Hungary, the Ghost of P2 in the Twenty-First Century

With this Part 0 the blog's second investigation opens: the "Ungheria" ("Hungary") case. At the end of 2019 Piero Amara — for almost fifteen years the lawyer of Eni's most delicate dossiers — declares to the Milan public prosecutors the existence of a secret association said to be the heir of the P2 lodge (Propaganda Due): some sixty eminent names, a list kept in Dubai, the aim of occupying the junctions of power, the CSM (the Superior Council of the Magistracy) included. More than six years later, no trial has established whether Ungheria exists or not: the investigation was dismissed in Perugia, avowedly for the impossibility of digging deeper after the "leak of information"; the calumny trial against Amara lies in Brescia. The scandal recounted here is not the lodge: it is the investigation that never took place. The premise that follows gives the reader the necessary context: from P2 to Tangentopoli, from Mattei to OPL 245.

This is a story that occupied the front pages of the judicial news for a few weeks, when it exploded with the statements made to various Public Prosecutor's Offices around Italy by a "pentito", Piero Amara, a lawyer for Eni, at the time of the facts highly influential inside and outside Eni, concerning a secret association named Ungheria which was said to have been a sort of continuation of P2.

One of his associates, Calafiore, also a lawyer, declared to the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office that he could retrieve the complete list of Ungheria's affiliates in Dubai, where it was kept by a fiduciary.

One of his associates, Calafiore, also a lawyer, declared to the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office that he could retrieve the complete list of Ungheria's affiliates in Dubai, where it was kept by a fiduciary.

Except that — and herein lies the public interest in understanding better — the judicial investigations suffered countless snags and cannot in fact be said to have been pursued in depth: from Milan, where events only partly known took place, they passed to Perugia, where the Chief Prosecutor acknowledged that the "leak of information" about the content of the transcripts of Amara's statements had made a thorough investigation impossible; with the dismissal ordered by the judge for preliminary investigations, the proceedings returned to Milan where, without further inquiries, although these had been expressly requested by the preliminary-hearing judge Salvini, they went before the Court with Amara charged with the offence of calumny and with the numerous joinders as civil parties (claimants for damages within the criminal trial) of many of the alleged "Hungarians".

The Court declared that it lacked jurisdiction, and the proceedings were transferred to Brescia, where they still lie.

What follows is, therefore, the chronicle of a judicial investigation closed without ever really having been opened.

The historical and political relevance of a deeper examination, founded on the few judicial papers available, is evident, and to that task I now turn.

What follows is a brief, summary reader's guide, with a few items of context useful, I hope, for framing the complex and not always transparent history of the "Ungheria" investigation within a broader picture.

P2 to…

The P2 lists were found by two great Milan magistrates, Giuliano Turone and Gherardo Colombo, on 17 March 1981, at Castiglion Fibocchi: nine hundred and sixty-two names — generals and heads of the intelligence services, prefects and police chiefs, bankers, members of parliament, magistrates. [1]

And they were not all of them: the official lists are considered incomplete, and in Montevideo documents of P2, still classified, remain in safekeeping; that a "more up-to-date" list exists elsewhere, in safety, is a hypothesis that has circulated for decades — and one that, in any event, no one in Italy has taken the trouble to verify properly. [1-bis]

The Milan investigation was soon transferred to Rome, where it was destined to come to a halt, in the Port of Fogs.

Of P2 there remain, in the history of Italy, a few significant traces.

Parliament enacted a law — the law known as the "Spadolini-Anselmi" [4] — which was meant to outlaw P2-style secret associations and which, in the event, dissolved P2 and did little else.

The "Spadolini-Anselmi" was born, with some not accidental hermeneutic tangle, so that it would remain a dead letter for the future.

Tina Anselmi had led the difficult work of the Parliamentary Commission on P2, which had historic importance precisely because it existed, and not for its effects of truth and of transparency in Italian public life, which were few.

It is, however, still possible today to read the concluding parliamentary reports — among them the minority report of the Radical Massimo Teodori, which is striking even now. [4]

Among P2's eminent "apprentice masons" was also Silvio Berlusconi (membership card no. 1816 [2]).

The two years 1992-1994 brought ferocious massacres, which it is not so easy to believe were of purely mafia origin, and that blood, objectively, together with the contemporaneous Milan investigations of Tangentopoli which contributed to the collapse of the First Republic, opened the ground for the birth of the Second Republic, which Berlusconi himself would lead, at least at the outset.

The Rome trials of P2 in 1994 removed the last obstacles on the road that was opening, which was not the fight against occult power in Italy.

In Rome, in 1994, it was natural — that is, in keeping with the Spirit of the Time — that P2 should emerge from the trials with a clean image, sweetened just enough.

The charge of political conspiracy had been upheld — fighting to keep it from falling — by a public prosecutor, Elisabetta Cesqui, whom public memory has taken care to forget.

The judicial case closed with the formula "because the fact does not exist" (and was so confirmed on appeal in 1996). [3]

P2, as an association and as an occult power, became for the criminal law merely a ghost, because it was said of it that it had never existed: it was only an elite club for cultivating business around the world.

In the contemporaneous (1991-1996) trial of Roberto Calvi's old Banco Ambrosiano, prepared by the judges Pizzi and Bricchetti with the public prosecutor Dell'Osso, the Court convicted with due severity all the defendants, among them authoritative former members of P2. [19]1

P2's interference in the old Banco Ambrosiano was thus affirmed by a Court and then confirmed at the subsequent instances, in a manner inconsistent with the Roman case law.

In the Ambrosiano papers there surfaced, in recent times, a document linking the slush funds of Calvi's bank — which P2 had penetrated deeply — to Gelli and to the probable financing of the Bologna massacre of 2 August 1980: a black matrix, "white" money.

A link which, decades later, justice would recognise, naming Gelli in a judgment as the instigator and financier of the massacre. [20]

Did P2 exist, then, as an instrumentum regni of power? Or was it only an elite club for business opportunities among its adepts?

It cannot be said that the news of the trials outlining a concrete link between "black" subversion and the dark Power of the State generated great interest in a public opinion ever more anaesthetised and rendered passive.

Public prosecutors and judges tried again — with the Naples investigations into the "P4" — in a climate of growing distrust that the occult could ever really come to light. [5]

Then, with the Fall of the Wall, the world began to accelerate, and power to adapt.

The Globalisation of Capital produced the Globalisation of Power, ever more indifferent to the ties and trammels that the Rule of Law imposes.

The propensity of the elites to govern outside the tracks laid down by the Constitution had room to grow, in step with the shrinking of the power of the State.

Ever larger shares of sovereignty migrated out of the enclosure of the rule of law, toward ever narrower circles of oligarchs, ever more globalised.

The phenomenon has been described in depth by a considerable literature, above all American.

The liberal-democratic State was becoming an encumbrance to the exercise of real power, although, outwardly, it continues to this day to serve as an elegant cover.

Historically, one may conjecture that the objective conditions of the relationship between the Judicial Power and economic-political Power were, in our country, more favourable than elsewhere to the rebirth of the occult and unconstitutional government of power.

Among them the fear — Marx would say — felt by Capital toward the class enemy, mediated not by the Party but by the Judiciary.

Tangentopoli — 1992-1996 — marked a turning point, with the humiliation suffered by Capital and by Politics, forced to climb into the defendants' dock in a ferocious collective rite, such as was "the Cusani trial" broadcast live on TV.

The daily clinking of handcuffs seemed to many an anti-capitalist revolutionary turn led by the Judges under the pretext of the Law, and a few tragedies made the political and social climate particularly jittery.

The country was indeed wrapped in the blanket of a system outside the Law, just as it was true, though not wholly, that the Judges abused the Law.

The Enimont "maxi-bribe" became iconic.

The investigations had brought to light the Corruption Pact between Montedison and Eni and the political world behind them for the closing of the Enimont deal in 1990. Extremely grave instances of corruption in judicial acts emerged, as part of a no-quarter fight for the control of Enimont, which subsided only with the payment of the so-called maxi-bribe by Montedison to the rest of the world.

Within a few years, however, the investigations lost much of their propulsive force, partly because of the reaction of the world of business and of politics, which grew in intensity, including through the use of powers that did not come from the Law.

Just after Tangentopoli there broke out in Venice the historic investigation of Felice Casson, which brought to the bar the entire Gotha of Italian Chemistry, public — Eni — and private — Montedison.

The State Attorney's Office (Avvocatura dello Stato) concluded that Eni — that is, the State — and Montedison were to be ordered to pay compensation for the environmental damage, quantified in a measure that would have brought Montedison to collapse and put Eni, and the State, in serious difficulty.

Montedison yielded and paid 500 billion of the lire of the day, but the Court, to collective surprise, acquitted all the defendants.

Almost in unison the media, at that time still leaning toward the left, criticised the judgment with greater or lesser severity.

Casson had in equal measure abused the criminal law in force and opened roads that could have led the State to create a criminal law more attuned to the present times than the criminal law of 1930 was.

In the first years of the twenty-first century there erupted in Syracuse an investigation by a public prosecutor, Maurizio Musco, against Eni, marked by the use of a judicial violence far greater than that of the Venetian investigation, of which it was meant to be the continuation. [14]

The criminal fact, caused by the presence, in the Syracuse area, of one of the largest petrochemical complexes in Europe, was known and never remedied, just as the grave excess mortality of the population was known, and the disquieting record of infant malformations.

The two judicial affairs ended in a historic failure for the Public Prosecutor's Offices, reached by different means in Venice from those used in Syracuse.

Impossible not to speak of Eni.

Eni?

History suggests that Eni has always been involved in the darkest side of Power in Italy, perhaps because it is the essential pivot of Italian Capitalism, and therefore a coveted prey and in its turn a predator.

A historian of contemporary Italy has noted that in a SISMI report — dating back to 1983 — it was written that the true founder and head of P2 was none other than the cumbersome figure of Eugenio Cefis: a hypothesis never tested in any trial, and therefore never the subject of a judgment. [12]

From here, those who like and love the game of free association may speculate on the content of the chapter of Pasolini's Petrolio entitled "Lampi sull'ENI" ("Flashes on ENI", Note 21) which — by chance alone or not only by chance — is the only one, in the version of the book that has reached us, to have been left without text: a title and a blank page.

Whether it was written and then removed, or never really developed, is still debated. [13]

Even today the opinion is widespread that Pasolini's death in 1975 may be connected to the investigations that Pasolini was conducting through the medium of the novel.

"I know. But I have no proof," he wrote in the Corriere della Sera a year before he died.

Cefis, after all, is one of the characters of the novel Petrolio (under the name "Aldo Troya"; Mattei appears in it as "Bonocore"). [13]

For that book Pasolini drew on another book: a pamphlet published in 1972 under the pseudonym "Giorgio Steimetz" — Questo è Cefis (This Is Cefis) — immediately made to disappear from Italy's bookshops.

An operation, that of the anonymous author, by all accounts hostile to Cefis, promoted by circles that had been close to Mattei (the publisher was financed by Graziano Verzotto, a Mattei man); the identity of the author remains debated. [17]

That book was later recovered almost by chance by the Pavia public prosecutor, Vincenzo Calia, who at the end of the 1990s reopened the investigations into the death of Enrico Mattei — hastily dismissed, in the 1960s, as an accident.

Closing the investigations with a request for dismissal (2003), for the impossibility of fresh findings on facts so distant, Calia wrote — after proving it with weighty technical expert opinions — that Mattei was killed by an explosive device, in all probability placed on board during the stopover in Catania from which the aircraft had come.

The magistrate could not identify the instigators, but he placed the crime in the context of the power struggles within Eni which, after Mattei's death, accelerated the rise to the top of Eni of Eugenio Cefis himself. [18]

The director Francesco Rosi, in preparing the film Il caso Mattei, drew on the advice of an important Palermo journalist, De Mauro, who then disappeared without leaving a trace except in his notes, which led people to think he had found significant evidence on the instigators of the murder.

The history of Eni was always the history of the industrial policy — and not only that — of the State, in an entanglement rarely investigated in depth and almost always shadowy and impenetrable.

If Mattei used the parties of the First Republic as if they were taxis for getting from one place to another, the practice of the illegal funding of politics became organised custom within Eni.

Eni's structure, as a public Entity under the Ministry of State Shareholdings, of necessity created the perverse entanglement documented by various sources.

The Eni-Petromin case caused great scandal.

In 1992, the Turning Point?

Bernabè, CEO of Eni from 1992 to 1998, carried through Eni's stock-market listing, in Milan and in New York, with a radical restructuring of the Group in which Eni, from a public Entity and a holding company without power, became, as it is today, a holding company that centralises managerial power over its subsidiaries. [21-bis]

The privatisation was made possible also by the contemporaneous collapse of the First Republic under the blows of Tangentopoli, and was steered by the then Director General of the Treasury, Mario Draghi, under the direction of the Prime Minister, Amato.

A Copernican revolution for Eni, which before then and from the beginning — after Mattei and the advent of Cefis — had been governed by those who governed the operating companies, from Agip to Snam to Enichem or Saipem and Snamprogetti, in close contact with the boyars of the First Republic, who did not welcome that revolution.

The power vacuum of Politics did not, however, last long, and the interests and appetites of before returned in the Second Republic too.

Franco Bernabè was attacked without interruption, between 1992 and 1998, by a power that he himself, publicly, has called P2. [11]

I was a direct witness to the fact that from the Tangentopoli investigations there surfaced, at the time, strange investigative documents which — inference upon inference — tried at all costs to implicate Bernabè in the affairs of the Eni management of the First Republic.

They were investigations remotely steered, at the time, by special corps of the State of which it is hard to prove to whom they really answered.

Bernabè's Eni had decided, at the height of Tangentopoli, to give unconditional cooperation to the investigations of the Milan pool, and this did not increase the number of its friends, who feared they could no longer do the hundred thousand deals they had always done.

And who ended up in the net of the investigations.

Affairs of State, such as the doubling of the Transmed pipeline between Algeria and Italy, carried out by Snam with Saipem and Snamprogetti in collaboration with Sonatrach, revealed the corruption beneath.

The defendants of the day, at the top of Snam, would have liked to defend themselves before the public prosecutors by invoking State Secrecy, but those were not times propitious to the granting of applications that might halt the judiciary's investigations.

Which indeed went forward.

Tangentopoli and Eni

Much emerged from the investigations of the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office, above all the figure of Pacini Battaglia, of whom it was murmured that he had so much power as to be "just one step below God"; but a very great deal remained in Eni's cupboards, because the investigations stopped as soon as they reached that mysterious figure of a banker who was no banker.

It fell to Pacini's lot to avoid prison in the course of the investigations in exchange for confessions largely incomplete and never checked with due care.

Of this I am a witness.

The Enimont case broke, as mentioned, and there appeared — among the other public and private managers, as well as politicians of almost every camp involved — the figure of Bisignani, then a novice, long suspected of belonging to P2, who was convicted at first instance and then plea-bargained his sentence on appeal on charges of corruption and illegal funding. [9]

His influence within Eni grew with the passing of the years.

The parasitic Eni-Politics system was not cut down.

From the trial papers emerged the practice of corruption abroad in the countries from which Eni drew the gas and oil needed for the country's energy supply.

"Everyone does it," people said.

Rivers of money flowed from Eni's affiliates into the Pacini world, and from there were diverted toward worlds just as occult, leaving no trace.

I shall come back to this in a moment.

The investigations into Eni's slush funds end with little glory

It all ended in silence.

Hasty plea bargains, often not a little generous, allowed by the Public Prosecutor's Office in favour of the Group's old managers, who thus exited the trials (often with their wealth almost intact in Pacini's bank); the conviction of Pacini Battaglia alone, with a scarcely interested Eni as civil party.

Pacini, having served a few short years in prison, had time to go back to doing what he had done before.

The haste to close the Eni case derived, as mentioned, also from the shadows that seemed to gather over Pacini's procedural treatment during the investigations, in the course of which — confessing the destination of only a small part of the immense flow of money he had administered, as "fiduciary", on Eni's behalf — he managed to escape the pre-trial custody in prison of which the Public Prosecutor's Office and the judge for preliminary investigations were then making very ample use.

Pacini appeared also in the investigations into the slush funds of Ferrovie dello Stato, which reached the then chief executive — formerly Chairman of Enimont — who was working on the financial structure of one of the first High-Speed Rail projects.

His criminal network seemed without end.

Eni and international corruption

From the papers that Eni had handed over to the Public Prosecutor's Office, together with dozens of internal Audit Reports, emerged the system of international corruption practised by Eni in the 1970s and 1980s.

There emerged the mysterious role of Pacini, at the centre of a spider's web of fiduciary companies into which flowed enormous quantities of money from Eni's great operating Companies, Saipem, Snamprogetti.

In the Pacini world, then, all trace of that money was lost, as if it had vanished into thin air.

Pacini, as mentioned, would not truly account for the money either to the Public Prosecutor's Office or to the Eni of the day.

The Eni trial had been built on the misappropriation charged against Eni's former managers for having used the money for purposes extraneous to the corporate object.

The OECD Convention on international corruption

International corruption became an offence in Italy by force of the accession to the OECD Convention, in 2000.

Art. 5 of the OECD Convention forbade member States from interfering in any way with domestic investigations and trials for international corruption.

It seemed to everyone, in Italy too, a great leap of civilisation, moral before legal.

For two decades Italy was a leading country for rigour and competence in investigating international corruption — above all, Eni's.

Twenty-five years later, Italy has suffered the disfigurement of being reported to the OECD for violation of Art. 5 of the Convention in relation to the trial of the OPL 245 affair and the investigations against Eni concerning the criminal activity carried out with the aim of tainting the OPL 245 trial.

As we shall have occasion to discuss in the coming parts, a former leading lawyer of Eni, Amara, in confessing the crimes committed with the aim of protecting the figure of today's Eni CEO, declared that he had been a member of a secret association designated by the name Ungheria.

Eni between 2020 and today

Eni's power in Italy — and not only in Italy — has greatly increased with the energy crisis self-induced by the European West through the break with Russia, which was our largest supplier of gas and oil.

The search for alternatives has become a question of survival in Italy as in Europe.

Eni, and in particular its current leadership, has very strong historic relations with Africa and, for this reason, became strategic for Italian and European energy supply in the present situation.

In fact, today, the State appears by now to have devolved to Eni quasi-sovereign powers in the field of energy policy and hence of foreign policy, in particular in relations with Africa.

The system of democratic control that so great a power must have is, however, still mainly dictated by the Civil Code, like that of any joint-stock company — which is what Eni is — operating in a free market.

The growing asymmetry between power and control lays the objective conditions for the further growth of informal occult networks capable of not answering to the Institutions of the State.

Eni's process of accumulating power, by subtracting it from the State, is still under way.

The two conditions — Eni's need for defence and self-defence against the Judicial Power, shared by all the great Italian companies, a Power which in the period 1992-1997 had shown it could be extremely incisive, and Eni's current growing power, international too — create the possibility of a short circuit that was perhaps destined to explode the moment the Judicial Power, as it has done in the last decade, knocked once more at Eni's door with very heavy charges of international corruption committed precisely in Africa, in particular in Algeria and above all Nigeria.

The Government's political choice to entrust to Eni and to the current CEO the strategic leadership of the Mattei Plan for Africa, announced at the end of 2022 — which, at least in intention, is meant to inaugurate non-predatory relations with the countries of Africa — tends to condition the outcome of criminal trials too, such as the Algeria case and the Nigeria case, in which a conviction of Eni would have made the very implementation of the Plan implode from within.

There exist, that is, all the conditions for a conflict of powers which, for obvious reasons, must play out in a highly dangerous void into which the law and public opinion must not enter.

Ungheria enters, or may enter, this context of quasi-subversion, or "state of exception", in which, that is, it is not the law or the judge that acts as arbiter, but which tends to degenerate into a ferocious war in which, in the end, relations of power count more than anything else.

Of this state, we shall try to speak.

OPL 245 and…

The point of departure for the research that will be proposed here is the Eni-OPL 245-Nigeria affair, with which, in 2011, at the height of the Scaroni-Bisignani era, Eni moved about 1.1 billion dollars (within an overall operation of about 1.3 billion), screening the operation to protect and render invisible the final recipients of the money. [6]

In substance, Eni did not operate very differently from how it had always done in the past.

This time, however, the screen appeared to be the Government of Nigeria.

The context of the deal was in itself hardly favourable to transparency, since the OPL 245 oil licence belonged to Malabu, the screen company of Etete, the immensely powerful former Oil Minister who had taken possession of it at the end of the 1990s.

While in Milan the investigations of the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office were getting under way, from the Naples Public Prosecutor's Office there had already emerged, in 2010, intercepted conversations in which Paolo Scaroni, then chief executive of Eni, Luigi Bisignani — the great éminence grise of Italian power —, Claudio Descalzi and the intermediary Gianluca Di Nardo discussed the progress of the complex negotiations in Nigeria. [7]

Of the four who were talking to one another, two — Bisignani and Di Nardo — do not figure in Eni's organisation chart.

The interception of those conversations revealed conduct abstractly characterisable — in my judgment — as an offence of insider trading of considerable proportions, which was never the subject of investigation.

The question — whether or not it is an offence is, perhaps, not decisive — remains, however, at least a historical necessity: by what title did Di Nardo claim to collect some tens of millions out of the 1.1 billion that Eni paid in Nigeria?

The four — Bisignani, Scaroni, Descalzi, Di Nardo — also conversed about Emeka Obi, a key figure of the Nigerian epic: the unresolved dilemma is whether he was an intermediary for Eni or for Etete, Nigeria's former Oil Minister, holder, through the company Malabu, of the OPL 245 concession. [10]

The solution of the dilemma is worth the identification of the final beneficiary of 200 million dollars.

In the intercepted conversations Obi is reportedly described as "our little man in the jungle". [7]

Eni's internal rules forbade recourse to foreign intermediaries except on strict conditions, but for Eni circumventing those rules has never been a serious problem.

Here too, as before, there is no answer to the question of the reasons why Obi should benefit from such wealth coming from the Eni funds for OPL 245.2

The judgment of the Milan Court of March 2021 became final long before the physiological course of the trial, because the Prosecutor General's Office decided to renounce the public prosecutor's appeal.

The OECD has described the judgment as contrary to the Convention that Italy signed, as a founding country of the OECD.

Who inspired the deal?

From the papers it emerges that it was reportedly Bisignani who suggested the Nigerian deal to Eni.

It is a rumour, perhaps more than a rumour, not a fact; but if it is true, it reveals an anomaly, because Bisignani could not know the oil market better than Eni, still less did he have the authority to recommend the deal to Eni.

There is a strange wind behind the Nigerian deal, and naturally the investigations never went to see where it was blowing from.

Claudio Granata, today Eni's Director of External Relations and Descalzi's right-hand man, left — in a memorandum of 14 April 2019, "La storia così come io l'ho vista e conosciuta" ("The story as I saw and knew it"), seized in January 2020 — the portrait of Bisignani's enormous influence within Eni: it was Bisignani, the then head of personnel Sardo told him, who imposed the hiring of Armanna, the "pentito", in 2007. [21]

Armanna — he too, according to Amara, in Eni and in Ungheria by Eni's will, then dismissed by Eni and later "set down" by Ungheria — revolves through the trial in various guises and embodies the ambiguities of an entire system of power.

In this only Amara outdoes him — Amara who speaks of Ungheria and who was, for almost fifteen years, a respected and powerful insider of that system.

And in the same memorandum Granata gives, without meaning to, a piece of corroboration for "Ungheria": he recalls that Amara had asked him to invite the chief executive — Descalzi — to the dinners "that were held in a deconsecrated church in Rome or near Rome", and that he maintained "a neutral attitude". [21]

What that round of Rome's Churches was, Amara himself explains to the public prosecutors: "when I wanted to affiliate people to Ungheria I had to take them to a church next to San Giovanni in Laterano". [21]

Since the days of P2, however, times had by now changed.

P2 had been an engine of reactionary policies often contiguous with subversion, at times with violence.

How did the trial of the OPL 245 case end?

The OPL 245 case, after the Milan Prosecutor General's Office renounced the appeal, is closed with the judgment of the Milan Court of 17 March 2021, and there will never be either a judgment on appeal or one before the Court of Cassation.

The OECD has declared that the judgment was to be considered contrary to the Convention to which Italy has acceded.

The judicial vicissitudes linked to the criminal activity carried out by certain former Eni men, Armanna and Amara, apparently with the aim of tainting the main trial in the interest of the current CEO, are today under the scrutiny of the Milan Court.

The current indictment charges the two, Amara and Armanna, with having calumniated the sitting CEO.

The number of investigations into international corruption has collapsed.

The two public prosecutors, De Pasquale and Spadaro, who had led the prosecution of Eni in the OPL 245 case, were themselves accused and convicted in Brescia, with a former defendant joining the proceedings as a civil party. [22]

The matter, as mentioned, is the subject of a procedure that will unfold before the OECD on the alleged violation of Art. 5 of the Convention by the Italian State.

Ungheria — if it exists — is not P2. Times have changed.

The spectre of the communism of the Soviet Union still terrified the West, and P2 inserted itself as a protagonist into the vicissitudes of the "Cold War", in which Italy was an essential front.

Today's oligarchies, at least until recently, have no longer had to make use of violence to preserve and increase their power.

Today power has less and less need to punish, or to threaten to punish, with the use of violence.

It rests on something more silent, and more effective, suited to the end — which is above all the will to power for power's sake, with no more ideologies needed to sustain that will.

The means are different because the end is different.

In brief, today's elites pursue the slow capture of the institutions of the State from within — hollowed out or moulded toward ends other than the public interest — certainly without eliminating them.

Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy dialectic still seems crucial.

The "enemy" is not shot — or so it seems — but, if need be, the means for his symbolic elimination are deployed against him.

Character assassination.

The general aim is the subjugation and disciplining of the Judge

It is here that the story I am trying to tell finds its keystone.

Despite the historical differences, there remains a thread of similar DNA, between the old P2 and other possible occult networks, recurrent in Italy.

Gelli's Plan of National Rebirth focused P2's political action on the need to bring the Judicial Power back to conservative orthodoxy and, in second place, the Media system.

An analogous Plan is today the Government's agenda, with the reforms of the Justice Minister Nordio, and the referendum which — roundly lost — was meant to be, had it been won, in the hopes of his followers and successors, the great posthumous victory of Berlusconi who, on Gelli's word, had drawn much of his programme from the Plan.

As Gelli already preached, the neo-reactionary or, if one wishes, neo-fascist programme needs to be able to count on a media system almost entirely subservient, and today Gelli's nightmare-dream seems reality.

The news, grave for the country, that the OECD will decide on the merits of a complaint against Italy for violation of Art. 5 of the Convention has passed in silence.

Of the Eni trials still under way one may no longer speak, as if judicial truth had been reached at the investigation stage and no one should presume to call it into doubt, with a reading of the facts alternative to the orthodox one.

Ungheria's accident-strewn path

To the Milan public prosecutors, Amara says he entered "Ungheria" through OPCO — a cenacle apparently scientific-judicial in character — which was governed by a magistrate, Tinebra, who perhaps made and unmade the history of Italy but who is very little known.

Then out of OPCO, no one knows how, Ungheria is born, and the centre of gravity of the activity moves from Syracuse to Rome.

One of the aims denounced by Amara was criminal penetration inside the Superior Council of the Magistracy, as a picklock for weakening the judiciary, subjugating it, diverting it from the duties the Constitution imposes on it.

Is it not true?

Amara names some sixty names, all eminent and some above all suspicion; his colleague, Calafiore, reports to the Public Prosecutor's Office that he is able to trace the person in Dubai who keeps the complete list of affiliates, but the outcome of the investigations is not comforting — indeed there is none.

The file travels from Milan to Perugia with a delay of months, during which the transcripts of Amara's statements become an open secret throughout Italy; Perugia dismisses the accusation but honestly gives notice that Amara is anything but a fantasist and that the first corroborating evidence for his statements had been found; Perugia, blaming the "leak of information" for the supervening impossibility of doing more, sends the file back to Milan where, without new inquiries, the Public Prosecutor's Office characterises Amara as a calumniator; at the preliminary hearing a good part, not all, of the "Hungarians" join the proceedings as civil parties against the "pentito"; Judge Salvini commits Amara for trial but at the same time asks, as a citizen, that the Public Prosecutor's Office carry out the investigations never done and try to lay hands on the Dubai list; the Court declares itself without jurisdiction under Art. 11 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and transmits the file to the Brescia Public Prosecutor's Office where, as far as is known, the file sits.

Latest news

Last January a preliminary-hearing judge in Catania convicted a Deputy Chief Prosecutor of Rome for corruption in judicial acts, on the basis of the charge that she had been promised the post of Chief Prosecutor of Gela on condition that she allowed the Eni defence certain privileges extra ordinem. [23]

According to Amara, the defendant was affiliated to Ungheria.

Last February the Milan Court acquitted Amara of the charge of being the culprit of the "leak of information" concerning his transcripts which, in the judgment of the Perugia Chief Prosecutor, was the principal cause of the impossibility of the Ungheria investigation. [24]

The question

"Amara — who, to be sure, is no saint — when he confesses his affiliation to Ungheria, is he really lying shamelessly against some sixty figures of today's power whom no one would want as an enemy?"

I do not know the answer.

A judgment — of conviction or of acquittal — at the close of a public trial on "Ungheria" does not exist, and probably never will; but, at the root, what is missing is also a true investigation conducted by a Public Prosecutor's Office.

This is the scandal.

Perhaps it is also the proof a contrario that Ungheria exists.

And of this one can, and must, write.

A note on method

I declare that I will use judicial sources — those I have — even though no Court has yet established whether or not they are reliable: if I did not, in the absence of a judgment, no one could ever again, now or in the future, speak of "Ungheria"; and that would be the collapse of all public discourse on so burning a matter. In any event, before the Tribunal of Reason, no public prosecutor or Judge has more authority than I, and, like me, if he wishes, he must explain the reasons for his opposite interpretation more convincingly than I have been able to do. The presumption of innocence — an endo-procedural principle, valid within the trial — has nothing to do with it: the historian does not write judgments, that is not his task nor mine; his research is to be judged by criteria of discursive rationality, without prejudice to the duty to respect the honour of all those of whom he speaks. I am aware that the great majority of historians of contemporary Italy prefer to steer well clear of judicial facts, but they are wrong, because in doing so they foreclose for themselves the possibility of establishing the truth. I am a lawyer, and I therefore have the competence needed to understand which sources I am using and what degrees of reliability they may have. It is evident that the History of Italy can be understood only if the historian and the expert jurist join forces. A great example of a synthesis between the two worlds comes from Giuliano Turone who, with an exemplary exercise of the civic duty that everyone ought to have, has written and continues to write precious books that I recommend everyone to read.

And precisely for this reason I do not ask to be believed. I ask that the reasoning be followed.

Notes and sources

General caution. The names indicated as "affiliates" of "Ungheria" (Severino, Zafarana and the others) are statements by Piero Amara, not established facts: the Perugia Public Prosecutor's Office dismissed the association hypothesis because it was unable to obtain corroboration, not because it had disproved it. The principal source is a man with criminal convictions behind him: the question of these pages is not "Is Amara telling the truth?", but "why was what he indicated as verifiable not verified?". The writer is a civil party in the trial, now transferred to Brescia.

1. The P2 lists. Search of 17 March 1981 at Castiglion Fibocchi (and at Villa Wanda, Arezzo), ordered by the Milan investigating judges Turone and Colombo in the inquiry into the fake Sindona kidnapping: 962 names. (Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, chair Tina Anselmi.)

1-bis. "Incomplete" lists / Uruguay. The official lists are considered incomplete; in Montevideo P2 documents remain, still classified. A specific "more up-to-date" list abroad is not established: it must be presented as a hypothesis.

2. Berlusconi in P2. A member, card no. 1816, affiliation 26 January 1978 (records of the Anselmi Commission). His deposition as a witness in the Banco Ambrosiano trial is the author's direct recollection.

3. The Rome trial. Acquittal on the political-conspiracy charge "because the fact does not exist" (Rome Court of Assize, 1994; upheld on appeal 1996); for Gelli, minor offences; the first-instance conviction for calumny against the magistrates was later declared time-barred. Prosecution led by the public prosecutor Elisabetta Cesqui.

4. The "Anselmi" law. Law no. 17 of 25 January 1982 (Spadolini government; the "Spadolini-Anselmi"): dissolution of the P2 lodge (Art. 5) and prohibition of secret associations; the offence does not operate retroactively. Minority report by Massimo Teodori.

5. "P3" / "P4". Investigations so renamed by the press (Rome 2010; Naples 2011, Bisignani): modest outcomes.

6. OPL 245. 2011: \~1.1 billion dollars (to Malabu/Etete), within \~1.3 billion dollars. In Italy the Eni defendants acquitted (2021).

7. Intercepted conversations / Naples. The Milan strand arises from interceptions in the Naples investigation ("P4", 2010): Bisignani intercepted with Scaroni and Descalzi; an intermediation role documented. The precise phrase attributed to Descalzi and the epithet about Obi must be confirmed against the transcript.

8. Obi and Di Nardo. Convicted in the fast-track procedure (Milan preliminary-hearing judge, judgment no. 2232 of 20.9.2018) and then acquitted on appeal "because the fact does not exist" (24 June 2021), acquittal final (confiscations revoked: \~$98.4 million to Obi, \~CHF 21.185 million to Di Nardo).

9. Bisignani / Enimont. First-instance conviction 1995, plea bargain on appeal 1997 (final 1998).

10. Etete / Obi. Dan Etete, former Oil Minister, traceable to Malabu (holder of OPL 245), convicted of money laundering in France; Obi an intermediary. In the Italian trial, later acquitted.

11. Bernabè. CEO of Eni 1992-1998; he has publicly attributed the attacks he suffered to P2 (statements, 2017).

12. Cefis "head of P2". A thesis contained in a SISMI report (1983) taken up by historical writing: a hypothesis, not an established finding.

13. Pasolini, Petrolio. Note 21, "Lampi sull'ENI": a title and a blank page (whether written-and-removed or never developed is debated). Cefis = "Aldo Troya"; Mattei = "Bonocore".

14. "Mare Rosso" / the Syracuse petrochemical complex. Investigation by the Syracuse Public Prosecutor's Office (public prosecutor Musco; mercury in the Augusta Roadstead). ISS-SENTIERI studies: excess mortality, tumours and malformations in the Augusta-Priolo-Melilli area; compensation paid by EniChem/Syndial (today Eni Rewind). The criminal charges in the proceedings were dismissed (causal link disputed). Subject: EniChem/Syndial/Eni Rewind, not "Eni" tout court.

15. Musco / Severino / Marcegaglia. The whole block is a statement by Amara (questioning, 6 and 14.12.2019): the "Oikothen" investigation into companies of the Marcegaglia family; Severino's ministerial inspection, with the chief inspector Di Tommasi ruling out "favourable treatment" toward Amara; Musco's precautionary transfer (CSM, 2012); input from Severino "on behalf of Marcegaglia" against the revocation; Severino "very close" to Marcegaglia (chair of Eni from 2014) and "on the Ungheria list" (according to Vietti). It is count C of calumny against Severino; Perugia dismissed it as "not corroborated". Musco outcome: acquitted by the CSM on the merits (2015, transfer revoked) → acquittal set aside by the Court of Cassation (2016) → final removal from office (upheld by the Cassation, 2019).

16. Zafarana. Commander-General of the Guardia di Finanza, appointed Chairman of Eni in 2023 (Meloni government). His inclusion on the "list" is a statement by Amara.

17. "Questo è Cefis". A pamphlet under pseudonym (Giorgio Steimetz, 1972), made to disappear from the bookshops; the publisher financed by Graziano Verzotto (a Mattei man) → an operation hostile to Cefis; the author debated. Pasolini's source for Petrolio; a copy later acquired by the magistrate Calia.

18. Mattei. Investigations reopened by the Pavia public prosecutor Vincenzo Calia; request for dismissal 2003: an attack (explosive device, tampering at the Catania stopover), instigators not identified. After Mattei, Eugenio Cefis rises to the top of Eni.

19. Banco Ambrosiano (Milan). Investigating judges Pizzi and Bricchetti; public prosecutor Dell'Osso; convictions (first instance 1992).

20. The Bologna massacre. Judgment on Paolo Bellini (reasons 2023): Gelli "instigator and financier"; \~15 million dollars traced through the records of the Banco Ambrosiano crash. (A judicial finding still evolving: to be attributed to the judgment.)

21. Granata's memorandum. "La storia così come io l'ho vista e conosciuta" ("The story as I saw and knew it"), 14 April 2019 (written on the eve of the Report episode "L'Amara verità", 15.4.2019), found and seized in January 2020.

21-bis. Eni's privatisation. Transformation into a joint-stock company (S.p.A.) in 1992 (Decree-Law 333/1992, converted by Law 359/1992, Amato government); stock-market listing in Milan and New York from November 1995, in several tranches, under the Bernabè management, with a reorganisation from a holding company of shareholdings to a group under centralised direction.

22. De Pasquale and Spadaro. Sentenced to 8 months for refusal to perform official acts, for the failure to file material considered favourable to the defence in the Eni-Nigeria trial (Brescia Court, October 2024; conviction upheld on appeal on 16 October 2025).

23. The Catania preliminary-hearing judge. Fast-track judgment of 19 January 2026: conviction, with a sentence of 2 years and 8 months, for corruption in judicial acts, of the former Chief Prosecutor of Gela, today a Deputy Chief Prosecutor in Rome; in the same proceedings, committal for trial of Amara.

24. The leak of information. Milan Court, 20 February 2026: Amara acquitted; the former Eni manager Vincenzo Armanna sentenced to 2 years and 6 months, for defamation. The source of the disclosure of the transcripts remains unknown.

whitecollarcrimes a collective byline · guarantor: Avv. Luca Santa Maria · 11 June 2026