For many years, the socialists have systematically blocked any debate or resolution in plenary session that could disturb Morocco a little…
Exclusive Analysis by Orientxxi.info – Morocco has entrusted the management of its network of influence to its foreign secret service, which has led to the opening of a debate in the European Parliament on the allegations of corruption and foreign interference in Rabat, even as the institution is preparing to vote for the first time in a quarter of a century a resolution criticizing the human rights situation in this country.
In the autumn of 2021, the 90 members of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Development Committees had to, as every year, choose the three candidates selected to obtain the Sakharov Prize for Human Rights, the most prestigious of those awarded by the European institutions. In the first round, Jeanine Añez, the former president of Bolivia, a candidate presented to the Spanish far-right Vox party on behalf of the Conservatives and Reformists group, and the Saharawi activist Sultana Khaya, sponsored by the Greens and the Left Group, arrived out. The first of the two women is serving a prison sentence in her country for “terrorism, sedition and conspiracy” following the coup that ended Evo Morales’ presidency in November 2019. The second was, in October 2021, for a year in prison at her home in Boujador (Western Sahara) and claims to have been raped, along with her sister, by the Moroccan security forces.
To decide between the two candidates, it was necessary to vote again so that one or the other entered the short list of three selected people likely to receive the prize. Tonino Picula, a former Croatian socialist minister, then sent an urgent email to all the deputies of his group, asking them to support Jeanine Añez. It was not a personal initiative. He said that he wrote this email on behalf of Pedro Marqués, Portuguese deputy and vice-president of the socialist group. He probably acted in turn on the instruction of the group’s president, the Spaniard Iratxe García. Añez therefore emerged victorious from this second round of voting.
SOCIALISTS BLOCK HUMAN RIGHTS RESOLUTIONS
This episode illustrates how Morocco has been the spoiled child of the European Parliament for decades. Socialists, especially Spanish and French, and many conservatives, have multiplied their respects towards the Alawite monarchy. While many third countries have been the subject of resolutions harshly criticizing their human rights abuses, Morocco has been spared since 1996. “For many years, the socialists have systematically blocked any debate or resolution in plenary session that could disturb Morocco a little,” regrets Miguel Urban, Member of the Left Group.
Rabat has only been pinned in very rare cases for its migration policy. It took more than 10,000 Moroccan irregular immigrants, including 20% minors, to enter the Spanish city of Ceuta on May 17 and 18, 2021, for the European Parliament to decide on June 10, 2021, a resolution calling on Morocco to stop putting pressure on Spain. The initiative was not part of the socialists or the conservatives, but of Jordi Cañas, a Spanish deputy for Renew Europe (liberals). She obtained 397 votes in favor, 85 against and an exceptionally high number of abstentions (196). Among the abstainers and those who opposed it were many French deputies.
A NETWORK OF CORRUPTION
Behind the long list of votes in favor of Morocco’s interests, preventing addressing embarrassing human rights issues, or on more substantial topics such as fisheries and association agreements, there was not only the corruption network that the press calls “Qatargate” while, chronologically, it is more of a “Moroccagate” that it is. First, there were these widespread ideas among MEPs that the southern neighbor is a partner anxious to strengthen its ties with the European Union; that it is in North Africa, and even in the Arab world, the country closest to the West and the one whose values and political system are more like a democracy.
So there is no need, apparently, to set up a corruption network when the game was practically won in advance. However, this is what the kingdom has done for a dozen years after the leaks on the investigation conducted since July 2022 by Belgian investigating judge Michel Claise, who specializes in financial crime, and published by the Belgian and Italian press since mid-December. “Morocco was not satisfied with 90%, it wanted the 100%,” explain, in identical terms, Spanish MPs Miguel Urban, of the Left Group, and Ana Miranda, of the Greens.
The Marocgate gear was born in 2011 when the relationship between the Italian socialist MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and Abderrahim Atmoun, Moroccan deputy for the Authenticity and Modernity party, founded by the main advisor to King Mohamed VI, and co-chair of the Moroccan-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee until June 2019. That year he was appointed ambassador of Morocco to Warsaw.
WIKILEAKS REVELATIONS
The revelations of what has been called the Moroccan Wikileaks will reveal, at the end of 2014, how much the Moroccan authorities appreciate Panzeri. Hundreds of emails and confidential documents from Moroccan diplomacy and the external intelligence service (Directorate General of Documentation Studies) were then broadcast on Twitter by an anonymous profile named Chris Coleman. We now know who was hiding behind this anonymity: the Directorate General of External Security (DGSE). The French secret services thus took revenge for several low blows inflicted on them by their Moroccan colleagues, starting with the disclosure by Le 360, a newspaper close to the palace, named after their antenna chief in Rabat.
In these Moroccan diplomatic cables, Panzeri is described as “an ally to fight the growing activism of Morocco’s enemies in Europe”. For this purpose, he held key positions in Parliament, such as that of chairman of the delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries and the subcommittee on human rights. According to Judge Claise’s investigation, Panzeri involved his ex-wife and daughter, but especially Eva Kaili, Socialist Vice-President of the European Parliament, and Francesco Giorgi, who was his parliamentary assistant and who was in a relationship with the Greek deputy. He was the first to admit, during an interrogation in December 2022, that he was working for Morocco. On Tuesday, January 17, he signed a memorandum with the federal prosecutor (under the Repentance Act) in which he undertakes to make “substantial, revealing, sincere and complete statements” as part of the corruption investigation.
The Belgian justice system also called for the lifting of the parliamentary immunity of two other socialists, the Belgian Marc Tarabella, and the Italian Andrea Cozzolino. The latter had partially taken over from Panzeri in the two organs he presided over. He had also been very active, like Eva Kaili, in the parliamentary commission of inquiry intoPegasus and other spyware that closely concerns Morocco. “Kaili sought to curb the investigation into the Pegasus software,” said Sophie in’t Veld, the Dutch MP who wrote the preliminary report on this spy computer program, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Domani, on December 19.
The “K Panzeri team”, which would have other members not yet revealed, would have received 50,000 euros for each torpedoed anti-Morocco amendment, according to the Belgian daily De Standaard. The amount seems modest compared to those supposedly paid by Somak Al Meri, Minister of State for Qatar, to improve the image of the country that was preparing to host the Football World Cup in Doha. The bulk of the one and a half million euros in cash seized by the Belgian federal police during the searches carried out in mid-December comes from the emirate. He apparently used the network formed by Panzeri. It continued to operate after its defeat in the 2019 European elections. To do this, the beaten MP founded a bogus NGO in Brussels, Fight Impunity.
On the sidelines of the snippets of the investigation published by the press, Vincent Van Quickenborne, the Belgian Minister of Justice, suggested Morocco’s involvement in this network on December 14, without naming it. He alluded to a country that sought to exert its influence on the EU’s fishing negotiations, but it was with Morocco that the Commission signed its largest agreement, and Moroccan immigrants are the largest Muslim community in this country.
TRANSITION FROM RELAY TO SERVICES
In 2019, Abderrahim Atmoun, the Moroccan politician who became ambassador, took a back background. The DGED, the Moroccan intelligence service abroad, has taken over and began to directly oversee the Panzeri network, according to information collected by the Belgian press. In concrete terms, it was Agent Mohamed Belahrech, aka M 118, who took the reins. Panzeri and Cozzolino would have traveled separately to Rabat to meet Yassine Mansouri, the boss of the DGED, the only Moroccan secret service that depends directly on the royal palace.
Belahrech was not unknown to the Spanish and French services. His wife, Naima Lamalmi, opened the Aya Travel travel agency in Mataró, near Barcelona, in 2013, according to the daily El Mundo. We see him again later in Paris, in 2015, where he managed to be the final recipient of the “S” cards, of people registered for terrorism, which pass into the hands of a border police captain stationed at Orly airport, according to the newspaper Libération.
The intrusion of Moroccan spies into Brussels parliamentary circles quickly attracted the attention of other European services. Vincent Van Quickenborne confirmed that the investigation was initially conducted by the Belgian State Security, the civil intelligence service, with “foreignpartners”. Then the file was submitted to the federal prosecutor’s office on July 12, 2022. Il Sole 24 Ore, an Italian economic daily, specifies that it was the Italians, French, Poles, Greeks and Spaniards who worked hard with the Belgians.
The latter, like the French, have accounts to settle with the Moroccans. In 2018, they had already detected another DGED infiltration operation in the European Parliament through Kaoutar Fal. It was French MEP Gilles Pargneaux who opened the doors of the institution to him to organize a conference on the economic development of Western Sahara. She was finally expelled from Belgium in July of this year, because she posed a “threat to national security” and collected “intelligence for the benefit of Morocco”, according to the Security statement. In January 2022, there was another expulsion: that of Moroccan imam Mohamed Toujgani, who preached in Molenbeek (Brussels). He seemed to be looking to get his hands on the Muslim communities of Belgium on behalf of the DGED.
If the Panzeri network had functioned properly in the service of Morocco at the time when it was apparently managed by Abderrahim Atmoun, what need to use the men of the shadow four years ago to pilot it at the risk of increasing European services? Aboubakr Jamai, director of the international relations program at the American University Institute of Aix-en-Provence, dares an explanation: “The secret services are enhardened in Morocco”. “Dodylandy is led by counter-intelligence and other domestic services. The deep state, the makhzen, is now reduced to its simplest expression: its security expression.” And this expression lacks tact when it comes to leading the kingdom’s foreign policy. Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita has another view on the scandal suffered by Parliament. His country is suffering “harassment and multiple media attacks (…) from people and structures disturbed by this Morocco, which strengthens its leadership,” he said on January 5 in Rabat, at a press conference with Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs. He did not hesitate to disagree: “We are concerned about these events reported by the press”. They are worrying and the accusations are serious. The EU’sposition is clear: there can be no impunity for corruption. Zero tolerance.
Borrell’s words only anticipated another change of tone, that of the European Parliament. The conference of parliamentary group chairmen agreed on January 12 to submit to the plenary session on the 19th a reproving resolution on press freedom in Morocco and the journalists imprisoned there, especially the three most influential, Omar Radi, Souleiman Raissouni and Toufiq Bouachire. This will be the first time, in more than a quarter of a century, that a critical text on the EU’s first Arab partner that does not concern its migration policy will be voted in the hemicycle. It was preceded, on Tuesday 17, by another debate, also in plenary, on the “New developments in allegations of corruption and foreign interference, including those concerning Morocco”. The time of impunity seems to be over for Morocco.
By Ignacio Cembrero
Journaliste espagnol, il a couvert le Maghreb pour le journal El País, puis pour le quotidien concurrent El Mundo ; il collabore actuellement à El Confidencial. Il est l’auteur de Vecinos alejados (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006), un essai sur les relations entre le Maroc et l’Espagne.
