Owing to his secret meetings with Chakib Khelil in a Paris hotel, Scaroni faces new Indictment

To everyone’s surprise, the Milan Court of Appeals quashed the decision not to prosecute the former Eni CEO, Paolo Scaroni, in the international corruption scandal affair known as “Sonatrach-Saipem”, the latter is a subsidiary of engineering and exploitation of the Italian energy giant ENI.

As a recall, the two main suspects, whose names were mentioned during all stages of the 5-year long investigation into the case of widespread bribery dividends paid by the Italian side, estimated at nearly 20 million dollars, namely Chakib Khelil, the former Algerian energy and mines minister, who was regularly cited in the preliminary inquiry together with Paolo Scaroni, former Eni CEO, were however not targeted by this lawsuit neither as defendants nor as witnesses.

And hence, the Milan Judge then issued a discharge in favor of Eni (parent company of Saipem) and its former chief executive officer, Paolo Scaroni.But the latter was entangled anew by this bribery case on account of his secret meetings with Chakib Khelil, former Algerian Minister of Energy and Mines in a hotel in Paris to discuss the conclusion of lucrative contracts between the two energy companies.

The Milan Appeals Court has not as yet revealed the reasons and motives behind this unexpected decision, but another Judge, according to the law of Italian criminal procedure, will take the decision whether to convey the file or not to the relevant Court.

In the same context, the lawyer of Paolo Scaroni and Eni said the recent decision to clear his client of all charges was justified because there was no tangible evidence that the meetings between the two men in the Paris hotel were biased in nature.

It is also expected that the same Court will consider next Monday in its second session, the case of Samir Ouraied, a close aide of fugitive Farid Bedjaoui, separately from the rest of the Algerian defendants involved in the “Sonatrach-Saipem” case namely Farid Bedjaoui and Omar Habour and three Italian defendants Pietro Faroni, Pietro Franco Tali and Alexandro Bernini, because of a procedural error in the notification made at the end of the preliminary criminal investigation.

The Milan Prosecutors accused Saipem of paying bribes worth €197million (£170million) from 2007 until 2009 to a Hong Kong-based Company to secure contracts with Algeria’s state-owned energy group, Sonatrach.

Saipem’s chief executive, Pietro Franco Tali, resigned from the Company in December after details of the corruption-related investigation emerged on the world scene.

Along with Russia, Algeria is Italy’s biggest gas supplier and Eni has substantial profit-yielding investments in the country.