Michel Claise, the Tonino Di Pietro of Qatargate
Il Foglio frustrates the Belgian magistrate Michel Claise of Qatargate by recalling some of his theories… Damato's Scratches
Not even the politically lamented but still alive and well Antonio Di Pietro, Tonino for his friends and demonstrators who walked the streets of Milan about thirty years ago encouraging him to make them "dream" with the judicial broom, challenged by the deputy public prosecutor against protagonists , actors and extras of the so-called first Republic; not even he, I repeat, had dared to go where Davide Carretta sul Foglio tells us today he had arrived two years ago according to the Belgian magistrate Michel Claise. Which is making the European Parliament tremble with investigations, arrests and photographic images of what the newspapers have baptized "Qatargate", but also with Moroccan sprinklings, according to advances that appear and disappear in the judicial reports.
Listen, again in Davide Carretta's story , what Claise was saying in 2020 speaking not of his activity as a novelist, mystery writer and so on but of the convictions on the state of democracy matured in his work as an investigating judge. Financial crime – he observed in an interview with the newspaper Le Soir – is a historical phenomenon “linked to the human body. What we know today is an unprecedented situation. They are fucked. Absolutely. Democracy, the democratic principle is fucked up for me…. from dirty money”, so that “one is no longer able to know who is what”.
Evidently there is some country in our so-called Western world, in our highly civilized Europe, where justice is administered worse than in Italy. Two years ago, with the publication of that interview with Michel Claise, no one above him in the judicial hierarchies believed that he no longer had the objectivity, serenity, neutrality and anything else necessary to investigate and judge corruption in general, and particularly on that in politics, so radically considered "fucked".
As in Italy thirty years ago, when, moreover, the investigators of "Clean Hands" were dealing with corruption without having ever gone so far as to speak of a "fucked" democracy, there was a media and political reaction to Tangentopoli chasing and overcoming the accusation, a partly out of cowardice and partly out of opportunism, so today in the European Parliament I see that the competition is now whoever overrides Monsieur Claise more.
The latter, for heaven's sake, managed to do better and more than Di Pietro, who on February 17, 1992 succeeded in discovering and having a few miserable millions of old lirettas seized from Mario Chiesa in the office of president of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, against the approximately million and a half euros, equal to about three billion of the old lire, lined up in front of the photographers by the Brussels investigators: in denominations, however, so small as to have been crammed into bags by those who had received them. But it is also true that here we speak very improperly of bribes, not having found the shred of a deal, in the proper sense of the term, granted or obtained in exchange for that money.
It is not a title built on the sand of guarantees that of the Reformist on Panzeri and Kaili, the former Italian MEP and the deposed Greek vice president of the European Parliament, both of the left, ended up "in jail" waiting for "the crime" to be found with which to send them to trial. As revolting as it may be, for heaven's sake, that show of banknotes displayed to photographers, already used in Italy by the Fatto Quotidiano to mock the poor former parliamentarian – he too – Pier Luigi Bersani, who protested against the right-wing "cow" in the seat of the Pd when he was still part of it, but he didn't notice the other cows on the left "at the manger"; although all this, I repeat, may be unbecoming, the habit of sending people to jail without even knowing the crime to charge against them is even worse crap. Thus democracy is fucked up, to quote the ineffable and botched Belgian imitation of the Italian ex super Tonino.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/michel-claise-il-tonino-di-pietro-del-qatargate/ on Wed, 14 Dec 2022 06:53:43 +0000.