Untold: Opus Dei - Power for Sale, Ep. 3: Belgiangate

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

It seemed like the Belgians had everything they needed to bring a case against the people involved with Qatargate, but the investigation hit a wall. Valentina and the reporting team speak to the prosecution side to find out why.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I present you facts, evidence of what happened. We're back with Eva in her apartment. She's got her iPad in front of her, and she's laying out her defense. Would it have happened the same way if I was representing another country? Would it have happened in such a way if I was not a vice president? Would the media attention had focused on publishing constantly my photo in this case if I was not a woman, I'm asking the questions because they are also in my mind. So until now, I don't know why I was in such a special treatment.

The official accusation for you is money. It's not an accusation. It's an investigation. What incriminates Eva, according to prosecutors, is that bag of cash that her father was caught carrying. The suitcase full of hundreds of thousands of euros that came straight out of of Eva and her partner Francesco's flat. We confront Eva with this. Can you see it's the fact of having such large amounts of money

like in your possession, even if it's not yours, it belongs to someone else. But can you see how people kind of coming at this would think that there's something more about that. This is something to discuss with Francesco Pancéri, with Arenda, with other people. She seems to get frustrated when we bring up the money. If it was of my knowledge or of my possession, I would understand if it comes from an illegal origin

and if it was part of something that was not legal activity. So I cannot talk in general because money is not illegal. Money is not illegal, she says. Yeah, okay, money itself is not illegal. But surely, having bags of cash in your house, potentially from a four-year-old. government in exchange for political favors, that is illegal. It depends. How did you get them? What for?

This is how it goes. So what Eva and her lawyers argue is that a suitcase full of cash does not prove anything. To be caught in the act of corruption, as the Belgians claimed when they arrested Eva, they should have also caught the bribeer. Otherwise, this money could be anything or from anyone. I mean, in everybody's mind is a bag of cash and my face. This was the media storm, okay? And until today, people only remember this.

So I don't think it matters what I say at this point. I don't understand why I went through this whole experience, I will call it, all this nightmare. Just as a reminder, this investigation is about members of parliament. accused of being bribed by foreign powers, including Qatar. Members of parliament like Eva, who stored cash in her home, gave favorable speeches and lobbied on behalf of Qatar. And the Belgian authorities still say she was caught red-handed.

But Eva denies all of that. She says there's no evidence she did anything illegal, and that Panzeri gave his confession under duress, so that nothing he says can be trusted. So in her view, Eva says it's the Belgian judicial system that's the problem here. What is illegal is how she was investigated. Eva says she's been politically targeted, that this whole thing is a witch hunt. And that it's been that way since the day she was arrested.

I couldn't call my lawyer. I couldn't communicate with a member of my family. I didn't know why I was detained. and I realized that all my rights were being violated. For me, this is the main scandal, how it was handled. So all these things are the beginning of what I now and my lawyers call a Belgian gate. Anybody who is accused of something often reacts like Eva, and especially a politician who is accused of corruption.

But the Belgian investigation did hit a wall. And as it turned out, the more we looked into the case, the messier things got. From the Financial Times, I'm Valentina Pop, and this is Power for Sale. Episode 3, Belgian Gate. When the scandal broke, everyone was praising the Belgians and telling them what a good job they did.

This is Laura. She covers Belgium for DFT. After I moved to London, she kept tabs on what was happening with the investigation. I checked in with her all the time. And I think we all thought it was going to be a really big case and sort of tip of the iceberg. I was really excited to kind of sort of dive into the story that was still quite live at this point. But as the weeks went by, suspects were released one by one, starting with Panzeri, then Francesco, and after four months, Eva. After such a big spectacle, it seemed the whole thing was fizzling out.

Why? Laura set out to investigate. In January of 2024, she went to talk to the federal prosecutor, who in Belgium is like the Attorney General. His name is Frederick Van Lue. So the federal prosecutor has a special task between intelligence services and the judicial war. There has been quite a lot of reports in the media

about the investigation being delayed. What do you think about that? Delayed. Each investigation has its own time. So the time of the investigation. It's not the time of journalism. He said nothing was off. All of this was normal.

But clearly, Frederick was deflecting our questions. So we received the most of the information first from the intelligence services that we have to confirm this information with evidence. And that's a normal process and that's the process that we followed in this case. Laura asked him specifically about Eva's accusations. One thing Eva argues is that the case against her rests on a coerced confession from Panzeri. You see, when he named Eva,

it was in exchange for a lighter sentence and for the release of his wife and daughter. So it was an extorted confession. He had to lie. He tried to have a deal to take his daughter out of prison, to not serve years of prison. But when Laura asked the federal prosecutor about this, He seemed unconcerned.

Another claim that the defence has been made is that some of the confessions, namely what pancery, the plea deal that he struck, was extracted under duress, would you reply to those accusations? So it's a strategy of defence that they are developing, but I don't have to defend my case. We don't have to defer on our case in the newspaper, but before the court. Some of the defendants, however, claim that the rule of law is not. being followed correctly, where would you reply it to these kind of...

I disagree totally when I think we have a very good system. The Belgian prosecutor denies everything ever has raised against them. He says, this is just what the defence does. But while he says they're following procedure, there have been some surprising missteps along the way. Here's Laura again. I mean, definitely some things were strange. the most public of them being the conflict of interest

that the investigating judge had, Michelle Klaz. It turns out the lead investigator had a conflict of interest with one of the suspects and just forgot to mention it for six months. That really threw a wrench into things. Here's what happened. The investigative judge, Michelle Klaz, that's the judge leading the probe,

approving arrest warrants, kind of thing, not the one who will try the case, just to be clear. Anyway, this Judge Klaz was kind of famous. He's fought financial crime cases before. He's quite high profile in Belgium. He's very well known. He's also a crime author. He's written several crime books, one of which I've read.

But it's not crime novels that made Judge Klaz famous. It's his reputation for taking on drug trafficking rings, corrupt officials, football players, and referees. David versus Goliath figure, who dared to go where no investigator had gone before, the inner sanctum of the European Parliament. Laura went to interview Judge Kles for a print story back in April of 2023. But he didn't want to be interviewed for the podcast. He said he didn't want to be on the same show as Eva, because Eva is a liar. But Judge Klaz didn't.

talk to Laura about casework in general? So he said the positive thing about having an investigative judge is that he's very independent and can lead the investigation independently. And then after talking for, I don't know, 45 minutes or something, he asked him, so can you just tell me, do we need to expect more in the investigation? and then I think he said, I can promise you that after spring will come summer. And then when I challenged him on that and said,

what does that mean? Does that mean we need to expect more? He just said, that's all I will say. What did you make of that? I mean, at the time, I sort of interpreted it as, yes, more will come. I'm also not sure if he was trying to mess with us. given the revelations later that there was a conflict of interest in the investigation. And what a conflict it was.

Just like the judge promised, more things definitely came out. Just not what you'd expect. More people were linked to Panzeri's network, but among those people was Judge Klaz's own son, Nikola Klaz, who was in business with one of Panzeri's main contacts in Parliament. It turned out that his son, Nicola Clez, had co-founded a business selling CBD, so cannabis derivative products, together with Hugo Lomere, who's the son of Maria Arena. Yes, a cannabis business with the son of Maria Arena.

You may remember her from the last episode. She is accused of being instrumental to Panzeri's Qatar operation. If this isn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what is. When Eva's lawyers got wind of this, they ran with it. They challenged the entire investigation, how the evidence was gathered, the wiretaps, her arrest, and whether it was appropriate that Judge Kless had failed to mention his conflict of interest.

In June 20203, Judge Klaz stepped down from the investigation. But the Belgian prosecutors downplayed it. They sort of framed it in this way. That's all we want to prevent a conflict of interest. There is none here, but this link seems quite strange. Laura asked Frederick Van Lowe, the federal prosecutor, about the surprising connection between the judge's son and Maria Rana's son. What do you say to these accusations of potential conflict of interest?

How do you see that? It was not mandatory for him to withdraw, but he took, I think, the right decision because it's a sensitive case that he. He had to do that. He gave Laura a bit of a boys-will-be-boys answer, saying, well, the judge's son is an adult in his 30s. The son of the judge's instruction is, I think, 33. I have a sum of 20 and I don't know what he is doing all the day. So it was a little bit problematic for the file, but it's what we also checked in the review.

One month after Judge Klaz steps down, his successor orders raids of Maria Arena and her son's apartments. They live right next door to each other. And in her son's apartment, police find several hundred thousand euros in cash. But Arena says this money is not hers. She says she doesn't know anything about it. I mean 280,000 euros cash? Yeah, exactly. It seems very weird.

Right. So I think you're all caught up on the detour the Belgian investigation took. The judge leading the investigation had a son in business with Maria Arenas' son. The judge steps down and once he does, another pile of cash is found in the home of Arana's son. And that wasn't the only complication with the Belgian probe that Laura came across. So another way the Belgian system is quite messy is that it's penal code until very recently went back to 1867. And this means that espionage was not considered a crime in peacetime, essentially.

You heard that right. Espionage and foreign influence were not illegal in Belgium in 2022. Which means when prosecutors bring this case to trial, they'll need to find evidence for other crimes instead. There are also other penal offenses that, can be investigating in this case. Such as corruption. Such as corruption, private corruption, public corruption.

But the problem is that it's much harder to prove corruption than espionage and foreign influence, especially for a sitting member of parliament like Eva. All of this has left us with a case still in limbo, with no end in sight. But so roughly when a trial can be expected at the end of this year, Or no idea? I have no idea.

I have no idea. There is each week there are meetings in this file. In each week there are new elements. So there is a very big team of investigator. It's busy with this file because it's speaking about very, very serious facts and possible offenses against our democratic system. So from the Belgian prosecution's perspective, the stakes in this case are high enough to keep added, despite all the hurdles.

Democracy is at stake. And with elections coming up, it seems important to make sure that the European Parliament is safeguarded against corruption. But was there something about the culture in the European Parliament that made Qatargate possible? We'll be back after the break. I'm Christina Cotorucci, and this season on Slow Burn. It's called Proposition 6. The Briggs initiative. John Briggs is going to fire every gay and lesbian school teacher in California.

With so much at stake, young people became activists. We can't let this happen in California. And activists became leaders. Slowburn, Season 9, Gaze Against Briggs. Out now, wherever you listen. No, it didn't come as a surprise because, unfortunately, that institution has not been the shining light of ethics over the years. This is Nick Ayosa.

He heads the Transparency International Office in Brussels, a global NGO that focuses on how governments and institutions like the European Parliament fight corruption. Laura reached out to him to get his take on the scandal that shook the European Parliament. Perhaps the only thing that surprised me greatly was the antiquated use of suitcases of cash. There are unfortunately easier ways of laundering money and hiding illicit funds. Antiquated or not, Nick says the bags of money are a sure. sure sign of wrongdoing and a way to really see what has been there all along, that the European Parliament had a certain culture about it. A culture of impunity among members of the European

Parliament, and not so not the staff, but the members of the European Parliament that allowed for this scandal to occur. And what do you mean by culture of impunity? Can you explain a bit more what that means for the members? Well, for the members, it means that they exist in an ethical framework that has very light rules. Here's the thing. One of the problems for the prosecution's case is that members of parliament are allowed to have jobs on the side. That's not against the rules.

And there's very little scrutiny around who their other employers are or how much money they make. So on these side activities, is there kind of an income limit or something? No, I can be a sitting MEP and I could be getting 700,000 euros a year advising a multinational corporation that is lobbying the institutions rigorously.

Does it matter if this other employer is a company or a foreign power? Say, a wealthy country like Qatar that may have committed human rights violations? It should be a conflict of interest. But Nick says... The conflicts of interest aren't actually banned under the... the rules? Why do multinationals want to pay MEPs, and they do, you know, very, very generous salaries on the side? What is it that they get from them? They get influence. Does that rise to a potential conflict interest? Of course it does. So now we know, the rules against conflicts

of interest in the European Parliament are weak. And this culture of impunity makes the charges in this case, corruption, money laundering, and being part of a criminal group, even holding. harder to prove. Nick says this is all pretty unfortunate because... I have a feeling that this is not an isolated incident. So without understanding where the weaknesses in the system are, this is going to happen again,

if not already happening now. And Parliament has shown no real interest in house cleaning. Remember those reforms that the president promised after Qatar gate broke? There will be no business as usual. We will launch a reform process, we will ask for more transparency on meetings with foreign actors and those linked to them.

I can wallpaper my house with the amount of non-binding resolutions on reform that the Parliament's passed over the years. This most recent reform package passed in the shadow of Qatar Gate was, according to Nick, no different. He says Parliament actually watered down rules about transparency and declaring payment. And in a reform package, you shouldn't be watering down transparency and disclosure rules when it comes to potential conflicts of interest. Nick just can't wrap his head around why the European Parliament has dismissed this scandal as a few bad apples and left it solely to the Belgian system to prosecute.

He thinks the whole place is rotten. I do think that it was a complete missed opportunity to really show the European electorate in election era that the parliament could be a shining line. of ethics in the Union. But not everyone thinks reforms are needed. Take Eva. To her, the Parliament is A.OK. No need for extra scrutiny.

She told Eleni as much. Do you think that the European Parliament has a problem with corruption? I really love the European Parliament and the work, the very hard work of a lot of my colleagues. I believe is the most democratic, house globally. And our whole system and democracy

is based on trust. So if I trust something is the House of Democracy, it's the European Parliament. Here we just saw officially a policy. Even if there was money in vote. I think there are so many safeguards that you cannot do that.

If it happens, it doesn't happen at this level. So no. I really trust the parliament and I hope that we can so to the citizens that the parliament was not harmed and we should not reduce it because of this case. I mean, to have meetings, to meet people, to discuss, to build bridges with other countries,

it's a good thing that's happening. The judicial review into the investigation is ongoing and we've learned it won't be complete until after the June elections. And the former investigative judge, Michelle Klaz, has dropped his legal career for politics. He's now running for a seat in the Belgian Parliament. And Qatar, they haven't even had their hands slapped. While everything's business as usual, what's the fallout from this scandal?

Would other scandals that followed even have been possible had the Parliament cleaned up its act? That's in the final episode of Power for Sale. EU politicians are accused of being paid to spread pro-Russian propaganda. German authorities busted. an aide to a European Parliament member on suspicion of spying for China. Fears amounting that democracy in the EU could be under threat from spies. Police have searched the residents of an employee of the European Parliament

and at his office in the Parliament's building in Brussels over suspected Russian interference. Power for sale is Season 2 of Untold, a Financial Times investigative podcast. It is produced with Goat Rodeo. The series lead producers are rebroad. Rebecca Seidel and Persis Love. Reporting by me, Valentina Pop, Laura Dubois, Sylvia Shori Liborelli, Eleni Varviciotti and Andy Bounds. Writing by me, Megan Nadolsky and Rebecca Seidel.

Story editing from Ian Enright, Tofer Forhes and Cheryl Brumley. Executive producers for the Financial Times are Tofer Forhes and Cheryl Brumley. Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan O'Donle. Doleski. Mixing, editing and sound design by Rebecca Seidel. Editorial and production assistance from Alex Parker, Judith Evans, Isabel Kirby McGowan, Joshua Gabor Doyung, Andrew Georgiades, Tamara Komornek, Misha Frankel Duval, Edwin Lane, Uyel Mosoriente, and Laura Clark. Special thanks to Nigel Hanson, Gavin Kalman and Michael Lello.

If you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch at valentina.pop at fd.com. Thank you to the many sources who shared their stories with us for this series. And thanks for listening.