[posted by Riccardo Arena, Anna Martinelli on La Stampa, February 6, 2018] A tight-knit criminal organization, with only one goal in mind: money, as much as possible, a lot of money and more. Among the many million-worth cases they had their tentacles on, the Eni bribes in Nigeria was by far the hottest one, so hot it had the “judicial gang” arrested.

The gang of 15 in fact, is not made of common criminals but actually men of law, namely attorneys and prosecutors and even a Judge, all corrupted, who behind the bugged courthouse’s walls of an apparently peripheral city such as that of Siracusa in Sicily, plotted conspiracies, discredited and threaten colleagues, ran files to other prosecutors or even simulated, and then archived, sensitive international investigation, involving ENI, one of the global supermajors, currently ranking 11th among the largest industrial company in the world.

The juiciest beef of this already-seen tangled plot, concerns one judge, Giancarlo Longo and a lawyers Piero Amara who teamed up in small-town-Siracusa and, among many other unlawful actions, allegedly went to the extent of masterminding a fake dossier implying the existence of a conspiracy against ENI in order to deflate the ongoing investigation – carried out by Milan offices – over ENI’s top manager Claudio De Scalzi regarding some alleged million-dollar bribes paid in Nigeria. An all Italian spy-story with a spin-off in Africa that will probably end with 15 people jailed.