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Anti-corruption campaigners have raised the alarm over legal action against two top Italian anti-bribery prosecutors who led an investigation into Italy’s state-backed Eni and the Anglo-Dutch energy group Shell.
Fabio De Pasquale, Milan’s former deputy general prosecutor and head of its anti-corruption unit, and his colleague Sergio Spadaro led a landmark prosecution over a Nigerian oil deal that ended in the 2021 acquittal of Italy’s state-backed Eni and Shell.
The two men are awaiting an appeals court decision this week, after being sentenced in 2024 to eight months in prison for allegedly withholding evidence favourable to the Italian energy major during the trial. It is highly unusual for Italian prosecutors to be put on trial over the conduct of their investigations.
Campaigners allege De Pasquale and Spadaro are paying the price for attempting to prosecute Italy’s biggest company, in which the state is the largest shareholder.
“While I fully respect the independence of the judiciary, it must be stated in this instance that, even if the facts established by the court reflect the truth, such an error by prosecutors has not, to date, been prosecutable as a criminal offence in any country, including Italy,” said Drago Kos the OECD’s former chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions.
Simon Taylor, the co-founder of NGO Global Witness, which was involved in the case against the oil groups, alleges the case against the prosecutors “stinks of political interference”.
“It is impossible to avoid seeing the targeting of the prosecutors as anything other than a deliberate effort to end investigations of Italian corporations for international corruption,” said Taylor, who now runs Amsterdam-based campaign group Hawkmoth.
After the prosecutors initial conviction, Italy’s justice minister Carlo Nordio, a former prosecutor himself, said that court cases “like the ones against De Pasquale’s don’t offer a good picture of Italy’s judiciary” and have contributed to the sector’s “loss of credibility”.
De Pasquale and Spadaro rose to prominence in 2012 after winning a high profile tax fraud case against the late premier Silvio Berlusconi, who was forced to leave parliament as a consequence of the conviction. De Pasquale was also the lead prosecutor on the Italian leg of the Qatargate investigation, which examined alleged corruption in the European parliament.
The high-profile international corruption trial against Eni and Shell, which ended in their acquittal four years ago, was centred around an undeveloped deepwater plot off the coast of Nigeria, named OPL 245.
Prosecutors alleged bribes of $1.1bn out of a $1.3bn deal were paid to Nigerian public officials for the licence when it was obtained in 2011. Eni and Shell have always denied any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors relied on thousands of internal Shell and Eni documents seized during the complex cross border investigation. Vincenzo Armanna, a former Eni executive dismissed from the company before the case began, originally testified that he and his colleagues “were aware that a good part [of the price paid for the oil licence] would benefit the political sponsors of the operation”, according to the publicly available case information.
Armanna also claimed tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks had been paid to Eni executives. Such claims were denied by other trial witnesses. Armanna later retracted his testimony claiming prosecutor De Pasquale pressured him to confirm that Eni knew that part of the price paid for the OPL 245 licence would benefit Nigerian officials.
De Pasquale and his colleague Spadaro were accused of having withheld five documents, including a video recording and WhatsApp messages, that undermined Armanna’s initial claims regarding the company’s knowledge of payments, according to records of the court hearings against the prosecutors in the city of Brescia.
Guido Rispoli, the Brescia prosecutor leading the case, declined to comment. De Pasquale and Spadaro also declined to comment.
“A court ruling [against the prosecutors] would imply that any mistake by prosecutors in Italy could be characterised as a criminal offence rather than merely as a violation of procedural rules that might lead to the inadmissibility of evidence or to potential disciplinary liability for prosecutors,” said Kos.
De Pasquale and Spadaro deny any wrongdoing, arguing it would have been unlawful for them to disclose evidence which, at the time, was the subject of the investigation. In court their defence also argued the decision not to include documents in the case file was within their prosecutorial discretion and approved by their seniors.
Taylor’s organisation Hawkmoth together with UK-based anti-corruption NGO Corner House and human rights group HEDA Resource Centre have also urged the OECD’s anti-bribery unit to review the case.
“Shockingly there now appears to be zero interest at the [OECD’s] working group on bribery to look into these matters,” said Taylor.
Kos said that during his tenure as chair, the working group engaged seriously with states regarding alleged breaches of the OECD anti-bribery convention “that were considerably less consequential and supported by far less extensive information,” Kos said.