Union secretary-general resigns over EU-Qatar bribery link

The secretary-general of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has resigned less than one month after taking office as he admitted to taking thousands of euros in cash from the MEP at the centre of a corruption scandal in the European parliament.

Luca Visentini, the Italian union chief, admitted late on Monday that he had accepted cash donations from former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri.

Mr Panzeri is at the heart of an international investigation into allegations that Qatar and Morocco sought to influence EU politicians through bribes. He has been charged with corruption and being part of a criminal organisation. Mr Visentini, who was released after 48 hours in police custody in Belgium last week, rejects any allegation of wrongdoing.

In his statement, Mr Visentini said: “I have accepted a donation from Fight Impunity [Mr Panzeri’s NGO] for a sum lower than €50,000, which was aimed at reimbursing some of the costs incurred to finance my campaign for the ITUC congress and I have transferred the sum to the ITUC solidarity fund in order to pay for the union’s travel costs [to Melbourne].”

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“I accepted the donation in cash [because of Mr Panzeri’s good reputation] and its no-profit nature ... it was in no way connected to a corruption attempt or aimed at influencing my position on Qatar,” he added.

Mr Visentini is banned from contacting other suspects in the investigation and will have to ask the Belgian prosecutor’s permission to travel outside the EU for the next three months, the statement said.

Italian investigators are analysing transfers to and from Mr Visentini’s bank accounts as well as six other accounts linked to Mr Panzeri and other suspects in the investigation. No sign of wrongdoing by Mr Visentini has been found so far, according to people close to the investigation.

Mr Panzeri’s lawyer in Belgium declined to comment on Mr Visentini’s statement and any other matters regarding his client.

Prior to the arrests, activists had scrutinised the ITUC’s position on workers’ rights violations in Qatar.

In the run-up to the World Cup in November, human rights group FairSquare wrote to the outgoing ITUC general secretary Sharan Burrow to express concerns about what it considered to be the confederation’s “failure to speak out against serious abuses by the Qatari authorities”.

FairSquare said the ITUC was exaggerating the effectiveness of legal reforms in Qatar. In a video produced by Qatar’s labour ministry in June, the ITUC general secretary had stated the employment system known as kafala, which essentially binds workers to their employer, was “dead”.

Critics say kafala is prone to abuse and can lead to conditions akin to slavery. FairSquare said many independent human rights monitors had documented serious problems with the reform and that kafala was “certainly not dead”.

“This is a deeply alarming development, and requires immediate and transparent investigation by the ITUC,” said James Lynch, co-director of FairSquare and migrant rights researcher, after Mr Visentini’s statement.

The ITUC said in a statement last week that its work on Qatar had, since the beginning, been “entirely based on objective analysis and assessment of the facts”.

“Any suggestion that any other entity, from Qatar or anywhere else, has influenced the ITUC’s position is entirely false,” it added.

Doha has rejected any allegations of misconduct. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022