Unicef funds, intended to fight illiteracy and school dropout in Africa, disappeared in 2011. They had been diverted to Italy. The family of the former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi will answer for these charges before the Italian justice.
Andrea Conticini and his brothers, Alessandro and Luca, will face the accusation of embezzling 6,6 million euros. The sum is part of 300 million paid by Unicef to the Fondazione Pulitzer.
The Conticini brothers, one of whom is the brother-in-law of the previous Italian leader Matteo Renzi, are at the head of the Fondazione Pulitzer. After a nine-year trial, they will face justice for embezzlement. The funds in question were intended to build rural schools, notably in Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Burundi and Sierra Leone.
A survey of several years
The case is as complicated and interminable as the path traversed by the money embezzled by the accused. It all began in New York in 2010. Unicef and Operation Usa then donate 300 million euros to several NGOs in Europe, through Play Therapy ltd and the World Bank. One of these NGOs, Fondazione Pulitzer, received € 11 million at the time.
Monika Jephcott, director of Play Therapy ltd, had reported to the Bank of Italy her doubts about strange banking transactions relating to Fondazione Pulitzer. The association's accounts had indeed transferred 2 million euros to a Portuguese real estate agency, 798 euros to a company based in Guernsey and 000 euros to two Italian companies, among others.
It turned out after an investigation carried out in 17 different countries that it was the managers of the Fondazione Pulitzer association, the Conticini brothers, who had set up a scam during the last ten years. They bought real estate in the name of the association and then resell it in their own names, as managers of the company also to the board of directors of Fondazione Pulitzer, Rignano sull'Arno, of which they are also employees.
Other diversions in France, United Kingdom, Germany and Spain
The Florence public prosecutor's office therefore decided, after ten years of investigation, to prosecute the Conticini brothers for embezzlement and money laundering concerning the 6,6 million euros which disappeared from the association's accounts.
According to a source from the Journal of Africa, the investigation should also become international in the coming weeks and affect other presidents of 19 French, British, Spanish and German associations. “Among the 300 million donations in 2011 channeled by Play Therapy and the World Bank, only about twenty credited the accounts of Unicef in West and Central Africa”. A source which also expresses its doubts about a possible involvement of the government of Matteo Renzi, the brother-in-law of the accused. The first trial hearing will take place on June 8.
The 300 million euros, part of which was embezzled, were intended for the first financing of a World Bank and Unicef project in Africa. The investors expected to raise up to $ 860 million in total to build 243 schools in Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Burundi and Sierra Leone.