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Baku/12.01.21/Turan: A former member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Luca Volonte, was sentenced to four years in prison on January 11 on corruption charges, Caucasian Knot reports, citing the Italian edition of La Repubblica.
A court in Milan found Volonte guilty of receiving half a million euros from two political figures from Azerbaijan. According to the court, Volonte received this amount in order to block the adoption of the PACE report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan in 2013.
The prosecution believes that Volonte's funds were formalized as fees for consulting services. Volonte received about 2.4 million, but only half a million was proven.
Volonte's defense expressed satisfaction that the former deputy was acquitted on most of the charges, with the exception of receiving the said bribe. "We are confident that after the appeal, even this small part of the accusation will disappear, and Luca Volonte will be fully recognized innocent," the newspaper quoted the lawyer Domenico Pulitano.
Italian MP Luca Volonte is involved in the international scandal Caviar Diplomacy - an investigation by the international NGO European Stability Initiative. He is accused of receiving 2.3 million euros from Azerbaijan, which was spent on bribing a number of PACE deputies in order to fail the report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan in January 2013.
In 2016, the Milan prosecutor's office opened an investigation against Volonte, bringing charges against him. His trial began in June 2019.
In 2017, PACE conducted its own investigation into corruption among MPs, creating an independent investigation team.
On June 27, 2018, the Committee on Rules of Procedure banned 14 MPs from accessing the building and events of the Council of Europe for life. Two then-deputies from Azerbaijan, Muslim Mammadov and Elkhan Suleymanov, fell under the sanctions. After the start of the scandal, they were no longer sent from Baku to PACE events. -0-
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