The International Confederation of Trade Unions (ITUC) is voting on Saturday on whether to reinstate Luca Visentini as its Secretary-General. The Italian was found to have accepted payments from disgraced MEP Antonio Panzeri, who is at the heart of the recent Qatargate scandal.
The trade union chief decided to leave his position at the ITUC in December of last year after reports revealed that he had received "a sum lower than €50,000" from the NGO Fight Impunity. The organisation was run by the Antonio Panzeri, an Italian MEP accused of having been paid by Qatar to lobby for them, even going as far as soliciting bribes on the states' behalf from other MEPs.
While Panzeri was arrested by Belgian authorities, Luca Visentini on the other hand can still return to his position as Secretary-General of the ITUC, with his future set to be voted on by the organisation's members on Saturday.
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In the run-up to the vote, the ITUC released the findings of their recent audit into Visentini, which painted him in a particularly damning light. Their report concluded that the payments from Panzeri's NGO had funded trips made by Visentini during his election campaign in 2022 to become the organisation's Secretary-General.
Among the trips Visentini made, he visited Africa and met with the continent's union representatives. With sources revealing to The Brussels Times that the African unions are among those pushing the most for Visentini to return as Secretary-General, one may wonder if these trips to the continent thus represent a conflict of interest.
Moreover, the audit revealed that a legal dispute has broken out between the ITUC and Luca Visentini. The former Secretary-General demanded that the former organisation continue to pay him following his resignation, which the ITUC disagreed with given that Visentini had himself chosen to resign.
