The Rosario Leo Files (Season 2) – Issue 1

Soon, new gas pipelines will be built in Italy for the transport of hydrogen - but this time, the budgets must not end up in the pockets of "il Sistema". Foto: private

(KL) – Rosario Leo is the head of a group of eight natural gas pipeline construction companies in southern Italy that played a decisive role in the construction of major pipeline infrastructures throughout Italy. These projects were largely financed with European funds, but unfortunately big parts of the money ended up in “Il Sistema”—that well-documented system in which politicians, judges, prosecutors, captains of industry, and organized crime line their pockets. Two years ago, we published a series of articles, which you can find in full at this link. 

At the time, we contacted all relevant European authorities, but none deemed it appropriate to respond to this scandal or take the necessary measures to prevent such acts of corruption in the future. We contacted: the European Public Prosecutor’s Office in Luxembourg (EPPO), which accepted our complaint and assigned it a case number, but nothing has happened in this case since then. OLAF, the European agency that combats corruption and money laundering, declared itself not competent upon initial contact. Eurojust in The Hague, the body responsible for coordinating cooperation between judicial systems, deemed itself just as unqualified as the then EU Commissioner for Justice, who advised sending the files to the EPPO or the Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office—all of them took note of our fully documented series and shrugged it off without a second thought.

Now, two years later, we are revisiting the “Rosario Leo Files”. In the coming days and weeks, we will contact all these bodies again, make the complete 2024 series available to them once more, and ask what they intend to do against “Il Sistema”. Since European funds are disappearing here and elsewhere, this is not an Italian issue, but a European one. For this reason, this time, we will seek more concrete statements than we received back in 2024.

To that end, we will bring this scandal to the attention of all 720 Members of the European Parliament, whom we will ask to submit a parliamentary question, in the hope that some of them will be willing to drain this highly corrupt swamp.

Rosario Leo, the entrepreneur originally from the beautiful region of Puglia, wants above all for this type of system to be publicly exposed and prevented in the future. Italy is being bled dry by “Il Sistema”, and the country deserves better than a “criminal conspiracy” involving politics, the judiciary, the economy, and organized crime.

We will keep you informed, as part of this new series “The Rosario Leo Files, Season 2,” about all the steps taken regarding the filing of complaints that have been concealed and covered up to avoid criminal prosecution—a serious violation of rights—and, above all, about the reactions of the competent authorities. Because it serves no purpose to build, at great expense, structures that are supposed to combat corruption, but which then look the other way precisely when faced with a concrete case of corruption backed by evidence of the crime. We cannot yet say how long this series will last—which will be published in Italian and English—because that depends on the reaction, or lack thereof, from European anti-corruption and government agencies. Perhaps this time they will truly do their duty…