He had said he had been ready for two months to respond to justice: the Belgian MEP Marc Tarabella was placed in custody on Friday in the investigation into suspicions of corruption within the European Parliament involving Qatar and Morocco. In Italy, MEP Andrea Cozzolino was also arrested as he was leaving a clinic where he was undergoing tests.
The 59-year-old elected socialist Marc Tarabella, deprived of his parliamentary immunity on February 2, was arrested early Friday at his home in the Liège region. He was brought to Brussels to be heard in the premises of the federal judicial police. “The investigating judge will decide on a possible appearance in the next few hours,” said the federal prosecutor’s office.
Alongside this, several offices of the town hall of Anthisnes – where Marc Tarabella is mayor – were searched, added the prosecution. Another search targeted “a bank vault located in Liège” belonging to him.
His home already searched
The name of Marc Tarabella, an elected football enthusiast who has spoken a lot in the European Parliament on the subject of the organization of the 2022 World Cup by Qatar, appeared very early when this scandal broke out on December 9. The next day, December 10, his home in Anthisnes had been searched, in the presence of the President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola, as required by law for a Belgian MEP.
But no cash had been discovered, and he had not been arrested, unlike Greek MEP Eva Kaili, caught in “flagrante delicto” the day before in Brussels, and therefore deprived of the benefit of immunity. Eva Kaili, stripped of her post as Vice-President of Parliament in December, is one of the three people currently imprisoned in this case, with her companion, parliamentary assistant Francesco Giorgi, and former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, also Italian.
A position that questions
Antonio Panzeri, key suspect in the case, now “repentant” since he admitted to having orchestrated this interference by several foreign powers in European politics, implicated Marc Tarabella before the investigators. According to the Belgian press, the Italian claimed in December to have paid “between 120,000 and 140,000 euros” in several installments to the Belgian elected official, for his help in matters related to Qatar.
Last November, before Parliament, the Belgian MEP welcomed positive changes in the emirate on the issue of workers’ rights. “There has been progress, it must be recognized (…) unilaterally negative discourse appears to me to be detrimental to the development of rights in the future in Qatar,” said Marc Tarabella.
The tone has changed. Seven years earlier, in 2015, Marc Tarabella had described the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar as a “casting error”, recalled the Belgian press. The Belgian elected official then castigated the lack of transparency of Fifa in this attribution. He denied having received “money or gifts in exchange for (his) political opinions”. The authorities of Qatar and Morocco have also strongly denied these suspicions of corruption.
Italian MEP also arrested
Also targeted by Belgian justice, Italian MEP Andrea Cozzolino, who was in a Naples clinic for medical examinations, was arrested on Friday on leaving the clinic under a European arrest warrant, a specified the agency Ansa.
According to a parliamentary report, the one who was until January president of the European Parliament delegation for relations with the Maghreb “is suspected of having participated in an agreement with other people which provided for collaboration in order to protect the interests of ‘Foreign States in the European Parliament’.
The parliamentary immunity of Andrea Cozzolino had been lifted at the same time as that of Marc Tarabella, on February 2, by a vote in plenary of the only elected institution of the EU. That day in Brussels Marc Tarabella had himself voted to lift his immunity, saying he was ready to answer questions from investigators. “I want justice to do its job,” he said.