Criminal charges dropped there financial guarantee of 800 thousand euros arrived and released the lock of the security cell of the prisoners awaiting trial: Marco Zennaro, 46, the Italian businessman arrested in Sudan almost three months ago, since this morning under house arrest in a hotel in Khartoum.
Not yet free, and it won’t be until the skein of allegations of fraud against him, but the conditions of his imprisonment finally became those that claimed the family and the Farnesina, through the ambassador Gianluigi Vassallo.
The house arrest, however, must not last another six months, worries the deputy Nicola Pellicani who this morning gave the news of the first step forward in the situation of Zennaro, from 1 April transferred from one police station to another, with a brief stop in a prison, forced to sleep on the floor and endure ambient temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees.
The goal – Pellicani still hopes – would be to be able to have him transferred to the embassy for the time remaining to resolve civil cases. But this morning in Venice, when it became known that the judge of the Sudanese court had ordered the house arrest of the fellow citizen, relief spread around the family.
The new plaintiff
The biggest problem, now, is that the guarantee of 800 thousand euros demanded and obtained by the local authorities in favor of the complainants may not be enough.
A new plaintiff joined the former, regarding a second supply of the electrical equipment company administered by Marco Zennaro. And therefore the request for another guarantee for another hundreds of thousands of euros could be added. Money that will return to Italy if Zennaro’s lawyers are able to prove that there was no scam and that the contract specifications were respected for the batch of transformers that the Venetian company sent to its Sudanese distributor, the company Gallabi, first complainant.
Already at the end of March, in the face of a transaction of 400 thousand euros, the lawsuit had been withdrawn, even if the local partner of Zennaro, Ayman Gallabi, then mysteriously drowned in the Nile. But in the meantime Gallabi’s customers had also come forward and other complaints arrived with the same accusation, in a crescendo of requests for compensation. Up to now, Marco Zennaro has cost 75 days in prison and an intense diplomatic work by the Farnesina, whose general director for Italians abroad, Luigi Vignali, he left in early June for Khartoum in an attempt to better understand the terms of the dispute and obtain at least a more humane treatment for the entrepreneur. A trip to Sudan by the Foreign Minister, Luigi Di Maio, already scheduled after the Paris summit on the financing of African economies, has in the meantime been postponed. The mayor of Venice Luigi Brugnaro he thanked the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, for the decisive work done
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The story, from the beginning
Marco Zennaro the sole director of Zennaro Trafo, a small Venetian company active in the country for over 20 years.
The local distributor of the company, the company Al Gallabi, had contested in mid-March – on the basis of laboratory analyzes of a local company in the sector – the suitability of some transformers which had been sold by the company, and which had been destined by him to Sedc (Sudanese Electricity Distribution Company), with a value of over one million euros.
Zennaro had left for Khartoum to resolve the issue, without imagining finding armed militiamen waiting for him upon arrival at the hotel.
Although guarded and under pressure (his passport had been seized), the entrepreneur had ended up reaching an agreement paying 400 thousand euros to Gallabi.
When he was about to return to Italy, on April 1, Zennaro was blocked at the airport by other soldiers who took him to the police station where he was notified of a criminal and civil complaint by the Sedc.
The transaction did not satisfy Abdallah Esa Yousif Ahamed, financier of the Gallabi Company and military close to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, vice president of the Sovereign Council that leads the country after the 2019 coup.
Abdallah Ahamed claims over 700,000 euros, but Marco Zennaro has never had any commercial relationship with him, explains the family’s lawyer in Venice, Aldo Silanos.
Making the situation even more disturbing was the discovery of the body of Ayman Gallabi, owner of the Al Gallabi company in the Nile, on 22 May.
The Sudanese magistrates asked Zennaro for a bank guarantee of 800 thousand euros.
The conditions of detention of Zennaro had been told by the entrepreneur himself: I stayed 8 hours in the prison of the court building where I didn’t even know I had to go – the textual, feverish account of the entrepreneur -. A little room underground in the dark. No water, no toilet, no way to communicate with the outside world. I was told it was to take me to the hotel. But the court decided the opposite: prison. I am told to get on a tin truck of 40 people for a 1.5 hour trip through the traffic of Khartoum. All piled up. An oven at 50 degrees. I arrive in prison, I’m afraid. I don’t know what awaits me. Nobody knows anything, I have no phone and nobody speaks English. They took me through the murder sector, drug dealers and criminals: a hell of 700-800 bodies piled up close to each other. Eventually they put me in the criminal offenses section with financial justification. There will be 200 people. All my new companions took care of me because hyear said he saw a dead man.
After weeks of intense diplomatic work, the turning point came on June 14th.
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June 14, 2021 (change June 14, 2021 | 14:29)
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/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/FLZYXZ4NUJAWXBTBFVBJROIIOQ.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1 "Murder of man investigated at construction site in Pleasant Grove")