Her own version of what happened in the Qatargate case is given for the first time by Eva Kaili, in an interview he gave to the French newspaper Liberation. The interview was given on April 25, one month before the decision of the Belgian authorities to remove the electronic monitoring bracelet from the Greek MEP (May 25), at Ms. Kaili’s house in Brussels

Ms. Kaili describes in detail what happened on the day of her and Francesco Giorgi’s arrest. “I was paralyzed by terror” is the title of the interview, while among other things it states: “I was put in prison for something I was not involved in. I never referred to the discussions between Pantseri and Georgie which the police listened to for a year. All the money was theirs and they told the judge. It is so obvious that I have no part in this case.”

At another point she points out that she knew nothing about the money found at her house and also talked about Francesco Giorgi.

“I completely trusted him (F. Giorgi). I have lived in relationships where there was no trust. I didn’t trust and didn’t want that with him. I had never seen this money.” Also, Eva Kaili told the newspaper that “there are no accounts abroad, in Russia, Cyprus or Panama. I have nothing to hide, everything is declared. And they checked and rechecked. And my fingerprints were not on the banknotes.”

Her lawyers, Michalis Dimitrakopoulos and Sven Marie, had stated in the previous days that “the legal process has been initiated to abolish the restrictive conditions, especially the ban on leaving the country, because she wishes to participate in the meetings of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. By order of the investigator, her partner Francesco Giorgi has been allowed to live in the shared residence.”

At the same time, the newspaper Le Soir returns to the investigations of the Belgian authorities focusing on the Qatargate case.

In particular, there is talk of the “bank movement” of the Qatar Embassy’s accounts in Brussels, but also of the Mauritanian Ambassador.

“Two of the Qatari embassy’s accounts with KBC, Ctif (Financial Information Processing Unit) warns in minutes which Soir was able to read, were heavily debited between January 2020 and December 2021: €252,815 one, €49,545 the other. Other days, withdrawals of 10,000 euros”. The paper also reports that the following year, from February to December 2022, the first of these accounts continued to receive cash withdrawals totaling €124,734.

Ctif is, to say the least, suspicious: “Given the allegations of corruption that clearly implicate Qatar, it is likely that at least part of the cash withdrawals made to the various accounts were used for this purpose,” he notes in one of the complaints sent to prosecutor’s office, according to Soir, while the Qatari embassy in Brussels did not respond to a communication from the newspaper.

In the same letters, Ctif also draws the attention of the judge and the federal prosecutor “to the wasteful behavior of the Mauritanian ambassador: between May 2021 and July 2022, 27,000 euros were mobilized from his ING account to rent an apartment owned by Francesco Georgie.”

“Almost €100,000 in cash was also withdrawn from the same bank account. Enough to feed the suspicions of the investigators since on December 10 Francesco Giorgi had confided in them that with his friend Antonio Panzeri they had worked not only in favor of Morocco and Qatar but also of Mauritania,” notes Soir.

As for whether the Financial Intelligence Unit confirms it has conducted analyzes in the context of the Qatargate file, it declined to comment further “given the ongoing judicial investigation,” Soir concluded.