Huawei-gate: EU Parliament committee backs revoking Martusciello's immunity

Fulvio Martusciello risks remaining the only political face of Huawei-gate. The Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament has given the green light to the revocation of his immunity, rejecting instead the requests made by the Belgian prosecutor's office against his party colleague Salvatore De Meo, the Maltese socialist Daniel Attard, and the Bulgarian liberal Nikola Minchev. An outcome that remained uncertain until the last moment for the two Forza Italia MEPs, who await the verdict of the Strasbourg plenary in the coming weeks.

But the vote has reopened accounts that were never truly closed between the European People's Party (EPP) and the Socialists, in a period marked by growing impatience with Belgian justice, which has been conducting major investigations – starting with Qatargate – that have dragged on for years without definitive outcomes. Exploded in March 2025 with a series of searches in Belgium, Portugal, and other European countries, the case of the alleged illicit lobbying activities of the Chinese telecom giant has resurfaced in the European Parliament with the vote on the guarantees necessary for investigators to hear the MEPs involved. Forza Italia – according to reconstructions from multiple parliamentary sources – has rallied around its delegation leader, solidifying the EPP front with the conservatives of the ECR, the European family of Brothers of Italy, and the Sovereign Nations of Europe group. However, due to the intransigent line of the Socialists – among whose commission members there is no representative from the Democratic Party (Pd) – the standoff ended with 14 votes in favor of revocation and 11 against. A narrow margin that leaves some room for maneuver ahead of the final word from Strasbourg, where, however, the indications of the competent committee are rarely overturned.

"I defer to the Plenary, aware of my total estrangement from the facts, as I have already had the opportunity to demonstrate during my hearing," Martusciello reiterated, strengthened by the support received from his party, saying he was "serene" and "certain that any useful element will contribute to clarifying" his position. The fate of De Meo was different, for whom MEPs rejected the revocation request with 18 votes against and 7 in favor, limiting the damage for Forza Italia. The vote on the two Forza Italia MEPs immediately recalled the precedent of Alessandra Moretti and Elisabetta Gualmini in the Qatargate case, when in November the European Parliament chose to revoke the immunity of the former and maintain it for the latter. A vote that many interpreted as the shipwreck of the guarantor axis between the EPP and the Socialists, and which continues to cast its shadow over the Huawei dossier, demonstrating how decisions on guarantees have become one of the most sensitive grounds for conflict between the groups. The climate, observe sources from the EPP, has "progressively poisoned" also after the case of Ilaria Salis, cracking that fragile equilibrium that for years had kept the judiciary's requests sheltered from partisan logic. Increasingly transversal, however, is the diffidence towards the modus operandi of Belgian justice, a knot that Forza Italia leader Antonio Tajani addressed with the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, at the very dawn of the investigation into the Chinese giant. And among the EPP members, there are those who ask Metsola herself to raise her tone with the Belgian authorities, even brandishing the hypothesis of transferring the legal seat of the European Parliament to France.