Deputy Premier and Transport Minister
Matteo Salvini's League on Sunday called on the Copasir, the
parliamentary commission that oversees Italy's intelligence
agencies, to intervene over reports alleging that the so-called
Metropol case was a set-up to make the party look bad.
The case centred on a meeting at Moscow's Metropol hotel in
October 2018 in which the three Italians and three Russian
intermediaries allegedly discussed siphoning off 65 million
euros from the profits of an oil sale transaction and diverting
the money to the League.
In April a Milan judge upheld a request from prosecutors to
shelve an investigation into alleged negotiations.
The Italians who took part in the meeting were Gianluca Savoini,
the former spokesman of League leader and Transport and
Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini, and the head of the
Lombardy-Russia association, lawyer Gianluca Meranda, and former
banker Francesco Vannucci.
According to reports by La Verità, the case was engineered to
make the League and Salvini look bad ahead of the 2019 European
elections.
It reported that the audio recording of the meeting was made by
Meranda, who allegedly then handed it over to Giovanni Tizian,
the journalist who broke the story of the meeting for weekly
magazine L'Espresso.
The daily reported that Meranda and Tizian are friends.
It also reported that Savoini and Tizian met an official from
Russia's FSB security agency, the successor to the KGB, in
Moscow.
"The scheming against the League organized at the Metropol
became a club to hit one of Italy's main parties with before the
last European elections," League sources said.
"The revelations from La Verità are becoming increasingly
serious and disconcerting.
"It is more necessary than ever for Copasir to intervene".
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