MILAN. The agreements at the center of the negotiations of 18 October 2018 at the Moscow Hotel Metropol «were unequivocally directed towards the final objective of illegally financing the Lega party, thanks to the relationships that Savoini, president of the Lombardy-Russia cultural association, had been able to weave with influential personalities from the Russian political, economic and cultural world». The investigating judge of Milan Stefania Donadeo underlines this in the filing decree of the investigation by the Milan prosecutor’s office for international corruption on the alleged Russian funds at the Carroccio in which besides Savoini the lawyer Gianluca Meranda and the banker Francesco Vannucci were also involved.
For the judge, who shares the final assessment of prosecutors Giovanni Polizzi and Cecilia Vassena, “the whole operation falls within a criminal purpose which does not constitute a crime”. And this is because the investigations revealed that “the final phase of destination of a certain percentage to the League has not been completed, but neither has the main operation of buying and selling petroleum products”.
From the investigations of the GdF, initially coordinated by the deputy Fabio De Pasquale and by the deputy prosecutors Sergio Spadaro and Gaetano Ruta, it was reconstructed how the agreement provided that the Anglo-German investment bank Euro IB, of which Meranda was legal adviser, would bought the oil from the nationally controlled giant Rosneft at below market price. Euro IB would therefore have resold the oil products to Eni Trading & Shipping, Ets, for a higher price than that supported by the bank itself, thus creating a fund that would have served on the one hand to finance the Northern League’s 2019 European election campaign and on the other hand, to remunerate the Russian mandates for having favored the completion of the operation. The agreement would have gone uphill due to the no of the CEO of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, who would not have given his consent due to the excessive size of the discount, requested by Euro Ib on the basis of the agreements made between the Italian and Russian negotiators, assuming that it could conceal an illicit remuneration for Moscow officials.
In this context, the dismissal of the hypothesis of international corruption is dictated by «the impossibility of precisely identifying the Russian subjects involved in the negotiations described and the public offices held by them» which, also in the light of the changes introduced by the Cartabia reform, « do not allow for a reasonable prediction of conviction to be formulated”. For the judge, further investigations are not possible “because of Russia’s lack of response to the rogatory already before the start of the war in Ukraine and the even greater improbability of obtaining an answer following the conflict”.
«The investigation into the alleged Russian funds in the Metropol case has been closed. Now we are waiting for the apologies of many, and we are preparing lawsuits for many ». It was the comment on Twitter by the leader of the League and Minister of Infrastructure Matteo Salvini. As had already been explained by the public prosecutor, Salvini had never been investigated in the matter as the investigation “has not acquired any indicative element of the fact that he had possibly been made aware of the intention to allocate a portion of the sum obtained from the transaction to Russian mediators to pay Russian public officials”.