Morocco has considered Antonio Panzeri an important and valuable friend for at least eleven years. Solidified during the two terms in the European Parliament, contacts have been maintained even more intensively since 2019, when Panzeri founded the NGO Fight Impunity. A bond that has become too close over time, like the analogous one with the State of Qatar. Both sent Panzeri and others to prison on charges of collecting money and money in a criminal organization against corruption and money laundering, which aimed to influence parliamentary policy decisions in the interests of the two states.
An investigation by bickering newspapers Le Soir and Knack reconstructs the relationship with Morocco from when Chris Coleman, a hacker with an Anglo-Saxon name but Moroccan identity, posted a series of confidential documents from Rabat online between 2014 and 2015. Among them was a diplomatic note from Brussels in October 2011, in which he spoke of a contact that had taken place between a representative of the Moroccan mission to the EU and the former Italian MEP. It was reported that Panzeri’s “advisers” broke a message to the “Moroccan authorities” at an informal meeting on the sidelines of a plenary session of Parliament in Strasbourg.
In the context of the activity of a parliamentary assistant, this could have been a perfectly legitimate normal case, so much so that the note was intended to prepare for the visit of then-Chairman Panzeri to Rabat, which would take place two weeks later by the Parliament’s Maghreb Commission. But there is something else, there is the attention of Moroccans not to embarrass the then parliamentarian who, perhaps by election, had to stop in an area with Saharan refugee camps before transferring him to Rabat: “Tindoufs Visit is essential to boost Mr Panzeri’s credibility with Algeria and the ‘Polisario’ (the movement active in Western Sahara), who would otherwise have considered him too pro-Moroccan, the document said.
In another 2013 note, the same diplomatic mission to the EU announced a plan to counter Morocco’s opponents in Parliament with conferences, debates and visits, and its “action with the President of the Maghreb delegation in the EP, Signor Antonio Panzeri, ret close friend of Morocco». As of 2019, the reports migrated with impunity from the offices of Parliament to those of struggle and, at least according to the claims of the Belgian judiciary, will become a criminally relevant issue from January 1, 2021. In fact, Panzeri would have become too closely associated with the Moroccan ambassador to Poland, Abderrahim Atmoun, a figure who moved around a Brussels study center in whose shadow Rabat’s intelligence services operated.
