Eni-Nigeria case, prosecutors De Pasquale and Spadaro convicted. “They hid evidence” –

The Brescia court sentenced the Milan public prosecutors, Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro, to 8 months in prison for refusal of official documents for having hidden evidence favorable to Eni’s defense in the trial for international corruption on the huge Nigerian bribe of a billion dollars, which ended with the acquittal of all the accused Eni leaders. The sentence was read in the courtroom of the first criminal section of Brescia by the panel chaired by judge Roberto Spanò and colleagues Wilma Pagano and Paola Giordano. The request of the prosecutors Francesco Milanesi, Donato Greco and the prosecutor Francesco Prete was accepted.

The court found the magistrates guilty and also sentenced them to pay the legal costs and to jointly and severally compensate the civil party, the former honorary consul in Nigeria, Gianfranco Falcioni, assisted by the lawyer Pasquale Annicchiarico, with damages to be settled in a separate civil judgment. Generic mitigating circumstances and conditional suspension of the sentence were granted with no mention of the conviction in the criminal record. The judges set the deadline for filing the reasons at 45 days. The facts contested in the trial occurred between January and March 2021. In particular, prosecutors De Pasquale, 67 years old and former deputy prosecutor at the head of the international crimes pool of the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, and Spadaro, 48 years old and now deputy at the European Prosecutor’s Office Eppo, they are responsible for 6 episodes of omission of official documents for not having submitted to Eni’s defense the elements collected by prosecutor Paolo Storari during the parallel investigation ‘False Eni conspiracy’ (trial underway today) on an alleged huge misdirection against the magistrates who accused the energy giant, with at the center the figure of the company’s former external lawyer, ‘the mystery lawyer’, Piero Amara. These are three 88-page documents, called the ‘Armanna falsehood’ after Vincenzo Armanna, former Eni manager, the major accuser of the oil company’s one-billion ‘deal’ to win the Opl 245 field. Among the elements collected by Storari there are the WhatsApp messages of 14 and 17 December 2019, extracted in forensic copy from Armanna’s phone in November 2020, from which it appears that he paid 50 thousand dollars to two witnesses in the Eni Nigeria trial, Tmy Aya and Isaac Eke, in particular to one of them confirming in the courtroom that he was the man who had introduced himself to them in Nigeria as ‘Viktor Nawfor’ and that he had seen “the Italians” take on board “trolleys full of money”, as the price for the corruption paid to Eni.

The telegram chat of 14 December 2019 between Armanna and Aya contained in the information from the financial police of 19 February 2021 which, unlike the paper copy filed by the former manager, showed the incompatible “message sending times” and which would have demonstrated the “counterfeiting” of chats. In particular, Armanna would have cut the phrase “But then I need my money back”. The WhatsApp messages between Armanna and Matthew Tonlaga, administrator of the Nigerian company Fenog, supplier of Eni, between 11 and 12 September 2019 in which he suggested what to answer on the eve of the interrogation of the latter made with an international letter rogatory to the prosecutor Laura Pedio. “These are what I think they will ask you” writes Armanna. “Claudio Granata (head of personnel at Eni at the time, ed.) was Amara’s real interface, everyone must understand this”, “it is important that you explain to the Italians that Eni tried to put pressure on me, strong pressure and you never accepted and for this reason they canceled the contract.” The Vodafone notes of 3 and 14 December 2020 collected by Storari which would have demonstrated how the chats between Armanna with the CEO of Eni, Claudio Descalzi, and Granata in which the leaders of the ‘six-legged dog’ said they were ready to rehire him after the dismissal in exchange for the retraction of the corruption accusations, were in reality false because in 2013 those utilities were not in use by Eni managers. Finally, the video of a meeting that took place on 28 July 2014 which records 4 people, including Armanna and Amara, acquired by the Milan Prosecutor’s Office from 12 April 2017 as part of information exchanges with the judicial police of Turin and Rome. With reference to Eni Armanna speaks of the “avalanche of shit that I am sending at this moment”. Two days later De Pasquale appears before the prosecutor and accuses the Group’s leaders.