Berlusconi received loans from a Hungarian company

According to Blikk, a Hungarian company has lent money to an offshore company that belongs to the Berlusconi family, writes hvg.hu.

Alfapapír Ltd. has lent millions to an offshore company a couple of years ago, in which the Berlusconi family has an interest. According to Blikk’s report, the two companies made a contract of €25 million in 2011, and there’s evidence that the first part of the loan (€6.7 million) was transferred to an Antiguan account which was registered under the name Emerald Cove Estates Limited. The interest was really friendly (1%), and a valuable Antiguan estate (which is close to Berlusconi’s villa) served as the cover.

The threads are going from Alfapapír to an Ukrainian billionaire, Dmitro Firtas, who wanted to make a deal with the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and to do that, he needed Hungarian money. The contract was signed by Georges Roth, who was the manager of Alfapapír at the time. Blikk visited the company’s headquarters, but could not find András Knopp, right-hand man of Dmitro Firtas who was accused of bribery, and was taken into custody in Vienna last year. Knopp owns the property through a different company. Knopp is the director of Firtas’ company, Group DF International (GDFI), which made dollar billions through gas trading.

Firtas would like to extend his company to Italy, and would have liked to meet with the Italian Prime Minister, Blikk writes. The newspaper has several letters at its disposal which proves: Firtas would have liked to make gas-and media deals with Berlusconi. The meeting took place, and they agreed on a €25 million deal. According to the contract, the deadline of the loan expired two years ago, but it was never paid back, and the Hungarian company has never asked for its money.

András Knopp is among those who were accused by the United States government; Knopp was charged with paying a large amount of money to a transnational criminal organization to bribe government officials in India to gain mineral rights. Dollar millions were transferred from one account to another to do that, but in the end, the whole $18.5 million was unspent. Knopp was suspected of overseeing the organization; apart from him and Firtas, four more people are accused by the authorities.

Knopp, who was an MSZP leader in the 1980s, told Népszabadság earlier that the accusation has no ground, and that most probably Firtas is falsely accused as well.

based on an article of hvg.hu
translated by Adrienn Sain

Source: http://hvg.hu/