The making and unmaking of Eva Kaili – POLITICO

BRUSSELS — Eva Kaili was unhappy with the seating plan.

It was a few days before POLITICO’s P28 gala dinner — a splash of glitter on the Brussels social calendar unveiling a ranking of the most powerful people in Europe — and the Greek lawmaker wanted to make sure she would be seated at a high-level table.

In a flurry of emails, her office in the European Parliament lobbied for prime placement despite not knowing who would attend. Kaili ended up at a table next to the EU’s jobs commissioner, Nicolas Schmit, directly behind Parliament President Roberta Metsola and the EU’s powerful industry commissioner, Thierry Breton.

By all accounts, Kaili — one of the most glamorous figures in Brussels’ political scene, a vice president of the Parliament and a celebrity in her native Greece — appeared to enjoy the evening, which included a video address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and barely veiled admissions by Metsola and Breton of their desire to become president of the European Commission.

Kaili’s approach to the seating plan, seeking proximity to power, was in line with the approach she’d taken during two decades in politics, going back to her first steps in politics as a student in Thessaloniki. Rounding out her second term in the European Parliament, she had every reason to believe that she, too, might soon have a seat in the front row.

Two days later, she was in jail.

In a sting operation that shattered the polite veneer of Brussels politics like a brick through glass, Kaili was arrested by Belgian police as part of a cash-for-influence probe involving three alleged accomplices. Of the four people rounded up in early December, including Italian former socialist lawmaker Pier Antonio Panzeri and Kaili’s own life partner, an Italian parliamentary assistant named Francesco Giorgi — all charged with accepting illegal payments from Qatar and Morocco in exchange for political favors — Kaili was by far the most visible, the most senior, the most politically ambitious.

A huge amount of information has come into public view since those whirlwind days, including allegations by Panzeri, printed in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, that he paid Kaili €250,000 to back her 2019 election campaign. (Kaili’s lawyer, Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, called the Le Soir report “completely inaccurate” and “unscrupulous lies” presented by Panzeri and “without any evidence, with the sole purpose of saving him and his family from prison.”)

But Kaili’s exact role in the scandal remains poorly defined. Unlike Panzeri, she has yet to admit any wrongdoing and remains in jail more than two months after her arrest, with judicial authorities refusing to grant her conditional leave on the belief she is a flight risk and could tamper with evidence.

Kaili’s lawyers describe her as the innocent victim of other suspects in the case, namely Panzeri and Giorgi, who they say exploited her rank and status to advance their interests without her knowledge. The fact that Kaili, who has a 24-month-old daughter with Giorgi, has been detained for two months with limited access to the child amounts to “torture,” they argue.

Yet Kaili’s arrest warrant, obtained by POLITICO, is adamant: It alleges she was a key member of the plot, who knew that illegally-obtained cash was being stored at her home, tried to warn accomplices after Giorgi’s arrest and courted Qatari Labor Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri, cited as a key figure in the case.

In an attempt to reconcile Kaili’s high-flying public profile with the allegations against her, POLITICO has delved deep into her past. From her modest beginnings in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, to national politics in Athens, then onto Brussels and the fateful weeks leading up to her arrest, what emerges is the portrait of a magnetic personality who strove relentlessly for higher positions, unconcerned about ideology or party loyalty or where she’d ultimately go, as long as it was up.

Among other exclusive details, POLITICO’s reporting shows how Kaili lobbied for and obtained academic degrees in Greece without completing the requisite coursework; how she and her sister Mantalena’s political and business interests in Brussels frequently overlapped; and how she lobbied, personally and forcefully, in Qatar’s favor in the weeks leading up to her arrest.

Throughout it all, Kaili stayed laser-focused on her brand as a tech champion.

For the Thessalonians who’ve watched her case from afar, her story brings to mind a Greek tragedy in which a brilliant protagonist, moved by hubris to commit reckless or arrogant acts, is brought low by fate — or Nemesis, goddess of revenge.

1. Auspicious beginnings

To understand how Kaili got to where she is today, it helps to travel back to Thessaloniki — the ancient Mediterranean port city where she grew up and got started in politics.

Unlike many frontline Greek politicians, Kaili wasn’t born with great wealth or political connections. Her father, Alexandros Kailis, arrived in Thessaloniki in the mid-1960s after Turkey expelled Istanbul’s Greek population. He and his wife Maria Ignatiadou had Kaili and her sister, Mantalena, while they were still very young. According to a contemporary who frequented Kaili’s parents’ house, Eva was like a doll for them and their university friends, the first baby of the group.

While pursuing a degree in civil engineering, Kaili’s father became involved in politics. According to former European lawmaker and fellow Thessalonian Michalis Tremopoulos, the elder Kailis started out as a far-right activist, only to join the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK, when it was becoming Greece’s predominant political force.

Never a frontline player, Kailis worked for, or in the orbit of, various local heavyweights regardless of their political leanings, including former defense minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos, a founding member of PASOK, and regional governor Panagiotis Psomiadis from the conservative New Democracy party. Tsochatzopoulos later served time in prison, while Psomiadis faces various charges in an ongoing corruption trial, with Kailis serving as a witness for his defense.

Locals point to Thessaloniki’s hotbed political culture as a window into Kaili’s political methods, and the allegations against her. Politics in Thessaloniki — a political kid sister to the capital — is built around personal relationships and a fierce defense of the city’s independence against always-encroaching Athens.

Insularity breeds corruption, argue these locals — a charge that the town’s mayor, Konstantinos Zervas, adamantly rejected during an interview in his office. “This” — the fact that several Thessaloniki heavyweights have been ensnared in scandals — “doesn’t have to do with the city’s political DNA,” he argued. “Actually, the problems have to do with [Greece’s] central government and the European Parliament.”

Eva Kaili’s interest in politics started young. She joined PASOK’s youth wing at age 14 and was elected president of her high school’s student council at 15. Then, after matriculating at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University to study architecture, she promptly got herself elected president of her department’s student association.

Decades later, that election win, and how she nabbed it, remains etched in the minds of people who knew Kaili at the time. Having managed to rally support behind a PASP (PASOK’s student movement) candidacy for the first time in her department, she was among the winners of a first-round vote. Under the school’s bylaws, winners then gathered behind closed doors to negotiate who would become the university department’s president.

According to one professor who asked to remain anonymous, Kaili promised rival parties whatever they wanted on one condition: That she obtain the presidency. 

The bid paid off. “Eva was above everyone,” said the professor, who knew Kaili at the time and, as usually happens in Greek universities, kept tabs on student politics. “She wasn’t interested in ideology; the rest of the party were very disappointed.”

2. A star is born

Kaili’s remaining time in Thessaloniki was consumed by politics, hanging out with fellow activists and friends at a café then named Santé. She ran for a place in the Thessaloniki City Council and won, becoming its youngest member, in 2002.

Her busy schedule didn’t leave much time for her studies, according to two professors who worked at the university during this period. Both said Kaili had asked to be exempted from attending classes due to her political commitments and be allowed to pass her architecture course anyway — a request they both said was quietly granted. 

Dimitrakopoulos, Kaili’s lawyer, rejected the claim. “It is an unbelievable and unprecedented slander, which not only insults Mrs. Eva Kaili but also the credibility of university education in Greece. Mrs. Kaili got her degree in architecture by studying and taking exams, like all students in our country.”

It was a big leap from Thessaloniki’s council to the national stage in Athens, which Kaili made at her first opportunity. In the 2004 elections, a local politician recalled, the center-right New Democracy party fielded a young blonde woman, Elena Rapti, to vie for election in Thessaloniki. PASOK’s response was Kaili, who ended up winning.

But then Pasok leader George Papandreou preferred to hold the seat in Thessaloniki for himself. Although she had to relinquish her seat, Kaili’s national career was up and running. 

Despite having no formal experience in journalism, she became one of the main news hosts at Greece’s then-biggest channel, MEGA, from 2004 to 2007. Gaining a national profile on TV and pursuing a master’s degree in international and European studies from the University of Piraeus, she prepared for her next electoral bid in 2007, which she won.

Soon thereafter, Kaili had another run-in with academia, this time public. Once again, she’d asked to be exempted from attending class due to the demands of her political work. But this time the professor, Nikos Kotzias, was unaccommodating. “It is a shame that a young person tries to get a degree this way, for which she did not work,” Kotzias wrote in a statement at the time.

In response, Kaili asked the university’s rector to be examined by a committee of professors, excluding Kotzias. The university accepted the proposal. She was eventually awarded the MA.

In 2012, Kaili ran for parliament again and won, but again had to relinquish her seat in favor of the party leader. Again sidelined from national politics, she went into the private sector, advising various Greek media and pharmaceutical companies, and spending evenings in bouzoukia — Greece’s traditional nightclubs — where she was photographed with various heavyweights from politics and business, including Greek-Russian billionaire and media mogul Ivan Savvidis. Kaili was also a regular at the clubs and restaurants of Mykonos, the hyper-posh millionaires’ getaway in the Aegean Sea.

Greece was tumbling head-first into a financial nightmare due to a debt crisis brought on by years of PASOK’s mismanagement of public money. But Kaili was on the move.

3. The Kaili sisters in Brussels

Kaili’s election to the European Parliament in 2014 was the culmination of years of ambition. Though beloved in Greece and backed by powerful PASOK figures, she’d twice had to step aside to accommodate male party leadership.

In Brussels, there were no such impediments.

In a glowing newspaper profile from this period, a reporter followed the newly elected lawmaker around as she prepared to leave Athens for the EU capital. “Kaili gets in her Smart car, opens the windows, puts on her favorite song, ‘Don’t you worry child[ [by Swedish House Mafia] and loudly sings the chorus: ‘Heaven has plans for you.’”

Another breathless account read: “After 12 years of party persecution, the beauty of the Greek parliament is preparing to conquer the European Parliament.”

The plan, as it turned out, was to make her one of Brussels’ busiest and most visible lawmakers. She became a leading advocate in Brussels on tech issues, taking an early interest in cryptocurrencies and tabling the European Parliament’s first legislative proposal on the blockchain, which was adopted. 

Asked in 2018 how we could explain cryptocurrencies to ordinary people, she said: “Cryptocurrencies are like the weather, you can enjoy the benefits, without understanding the process hidden behind it.”

Kaili multiplied committee assignments, speeches, social media outreach and events — no different from other EU lawmakers, but at a higher pace. One key to Kaili’s elevated metabolism in the Brussels system was her close relationship with her sister, Mantalena.

As POLITICO reported in December, Mantalena established a multipurpose organization — MADE Group — whose focus often overlapped with her sister’s career, and which received hefty sums of EU money for projects which, in turn, had Eva’s support.

In some cases, Eva’s action in Parliament and Mantalena’s business dovetailed almost too nicely. According to Henri Estramant, who worked as a consultant in Kaili’s office, Mantalena described herself as an “adviser” to her sister and tasked him with writing proposals for Eva’s parliamentary work.

The clearest examples of overlap emerge when one looks at Eva Kaili’s pilot projects. By pitching pilot projects, lawmakers can seek funding from the European Commission for experimental initiatives such as awards, events and research. Between 2016 and 2022, Eva Kaili got no fewer than 26 pilot projects approved, at least one of which ended up benefitting Mantalena’s business.

The pilot project, which Kaili proposed and got approved in 2017, was named “Art and the digital,” and earmarked €1 million of Commission money for initiatives focused on art and tech across the EU. Two applicants bid for the project, including a consortium led by Brussels art gallery Bozar and including Mantalena’s company, MADE Group.

According to a Bozar spokesperson, it was Mantalena who contacted the gallery in 2018 and “proposed [herself] as a potential partner.” A former Bozar employee, speaking anonymously, said Mantalena seemed “well aware and informed” about the pilot project when she made her pitch. MADE Group made €105,172 from its participation in the pilot.

That’s just one example of their partnership. In 2022, as the Ukrainian war raged on, Eva Kaili presented a pilot project for an app (budget: €850,000) to keep track of unaccompanied Ukrainian minors.

The amendment proposing the pilot project insisted that the best way to create the app would be to build on an existing EU project, ChildRescue — developed in 2018 to help find missing child refugees. “Only by taking advantage of the ChildRescue existing tools, a complete solution as described in the proposal could be developed in a quick and efficient manner as the war is still ongoing and the time is putting pressure,” Kaili’s amendment read.

It so happened that Mantalena Kaili’s MADE Group was among the companies that developed ChildRescue, receiving €104,037.50 in EU funds between 2018 and 2020. The Commission, which declined to comment, has not yet started the tendering process for the Ukrainian pilot.

Asked about the relationship, Dimitrakopoulos, who also represents Mantalena, said: “It is wrong for Kaili’s sister to be unfairly attacked. As far as I know, she participated in the non-profit civil society company MADE Group, which has been repeatedly audited by the competent authorities and everything is legal.”

4. Qatar beckons

No venture was to prove as fateful for Kaili, however, than her association with Qatar.

Kaili had already traveled to the emirate with Giorgi and Panzeri in 2020 but after she became a vice president of the Parliament in January 2022, she began planning more trips to the Gulf. At the end of October 2022, she was again in Doha where she praised Qatar’s labor reforms, after a successful push to get the consent of Parliament President Metsola for the trip.

According to four emails between Kaili and Metsola obtained by POLITICO through freedom of information requests, Kaili spent months pushing Metsola to let her go to Qatar and Kuwait. Metsola signed off on the trip just one week before it occurred, but Hannah Neumann, a Green MEP who chairs the Parliament’s delegation to the Arabian Peninsula (DARP) where Kaili was a substitute member, was not informed. Neumann said Qatar had canceled a trip arranged for her delegation and that she was surprised to see Kaili going.

In the first email, sent in July last year, Kaili wrote to Metsola: “I am convinced that the EP [European Parliament] has a stronger role to play in the Gulf.” In that email, Kaili called for the establishment of a parliamentary assembly between Gulf countries and the European Parliament, and an EU summit with the Gulf Coordination Council, a regional group made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

In Doha, Kaili met everyone from the Emir of Qatar to the foreign minister and head of the Shura Council, the Gulf state’s legislative body. According to the Greek press, Kaili also met a man called Sakis Batsilas, a Greek who was the deputy CEO of Qatar’s FIFA 2022 World Cup, and a strategic adviser on the original bid in 2010. She tweeted that she talked about the “prospects” opened up by a forthcoming vote on a visa waiver for Qatar. 

It was far from Kaili’s only efforts on Qatar’s behalf.

In the run-up to the emirate’s hosting of the World Cup, there was a flurry of activity around a resolution about its record on labor rights following an investigation by the Guardian which alleged that 6,500 migrant laborers had perished while working on World Cup construction sites. With the tournament set to kick off in late November, the stakes were high for Doha — negative publicity could stain the modernizing image its World Cup extravaganza was meant to promote.

Kaili and other lawmakers from the center-left Socialist and Democrats group had taken a favorable stance on Qatar’s labor record, arguing the Gulf country had addressed concerns by passing reforms. But not everyone in the European Parliament felt Qatar deserved praise. Lara Wolters, a Dutch lawmaker who belongs to the same group as Kaili, was one of Qatar’s most outspoken critics.

Ahead of a November 14 hearing with Qatari Labor Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri — whom Belgian prosecutors would later mention as a key figure in the cash-for-influence scheme — Kaili’s office repeatedly reached out to Wolters for a meeting. When Wolters’ office failed to follow up on the requests, Kaili approached her in the hallways of Parliament to press her case, according to a Parliament official with direct knowledge who declined to be named.

When Wolters got up to speak during the hearing, two other suspects in the case, Socialist lawmaker Marc Tarabella and Kaili’s partner Giorgi, were in the room. After Wolters spoke, Tarabella took to the microphone to offer a counterpoint, praising Qatar’s labor record. “I felt extremely uncomfortable,” Wolters told POLITICO. “I guess I realized the scale of the pushback.”

A lawyer for Tarabella said his intervention that day was “completely measured. All he’s saying is stop looking at things 10 years ago.” A lawyer for Giorgi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A week later, on November 21, the Parliament was due to vote on the resolution. It was at that time that Kaili delivered a speech in which she said: “I alone said that Qatar is a frontrunner in labor rights, abolishing kafala [a worker sponsorship system prone to abuse] and reducing minimum wage.”

Her speech done, Kaili made a beeline for Wolters, who was sitting in the audience. “Eva comes to me and essentially tries to stop me from speaking,” Wolters told the EU Scream podcast in February. “She kept insisting on the stuff that she said in her speech. She said, very personally, why are you doing this?” Undeterred, Wolters got up to deliver her speech, blasting Qatar’s labor record.

Kaili’s last public act in Qatar’s favor prior to her arrest came a few days later. The Gulf state had been lobbying the EU to grant its citizens visa-free travel to the bloc, and Parliament’s civil liberties committee was due to vote on a report about the proposal.

Despite not being a member or even a substitute member of the committee, Kaili showed up and voted in favor of the report. While this isn’t against Parliament’s rules, lawmakers are expected to inform peers and staffers of their intention to drop in for a vote. Kaili hadn’t done so. According to Gabriele Bischoff, a German member of the Socialist and Democrats group, the impromptu vote was enough to set alarm bells ringing among other members of the Parliament. Kaili’s vote in the committee was “totally against our rules,” Bischoff said.

“There was already a written complaint about it and talks [among S&D lawmakers], to say, to clarify what had happened there, that this is also against our internal rules, and to explore what had happened there,” she added.

The head of the Socialists and Democrats group in Parliament, Iratxe García, called Kaili to a meeting in Strasbourg to explain herself, according to somebody in the European Parliament closely involved in the process. But before the meeting could happen, Kaili was arrested.

Asked about Kaili’s lobbying, her lawyer said the suggestion she had a personal agenda for Qatar was a “big myth, which will be totally debunked.” 

“Mrs. Kaili had no executive power, as is the case with all MEPs,” he said, arguing that the big decisions were made by the European Council and European Commission.

5. Counting the money

As the Qatargate scandal keeps widening, roping in further names, questions still abound about the extent of Kaili’s role. The Greek lawmaker is facing charges of corruption, money laundering and participation in a criminal organization. 

According to the arrest warrant obtained by POLITICO, Kaili purchased a second apartment in Brussels at an undisclosed date, which her partner, Giorgi, “unofficially” helped to pay off.

In addition, Kaili and Giorgi last March purchased a 1-hectare plot of land on the Greek island of Paros for €300,000. Shortly after their arrests, Greece’s anti-money laundering authority froze all assets belonging to her and her family, including the plot, as well as the bank accounts used to purchase it. Asked about the land purchase, Kaili’s lawyer Dimitrakopoulos said the property purchase was legal and the money used to buy it came from her regular income. 

Kaili’s determination to accrue wealth and high-level contacts stems from a sense of insecurity, according to a former member of her staff in Parliament. “It feels like she grew up with a lot of deprivations so she was very careful about spending,” the staffer said. “She wanted to have houses and things that will help her survive if something goes wrong.”

During raids in early December, police recovered €150,000 in cash from Kaili’s apartment and a bag full of money carried by her father.

According to her arrest warrant, shortly after her partner Giorgi was arrested, Kaili contacted Panzeri and two members of the European Parliament. The Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported last week that Kaili had tried to contact her father from jail, instructing him to dispose of phones and USB memory sticks. POLITICO has not been able to verify the report.

Kaili’s lawyer Dimitrakopoulos pushed back against the claim. “It is inaccurate that Kaili used the prison phone to give an order to one of her associates to disappear mobile phones and a USB stick,” he wrote in an email. “This week Mrs. Kaili, accompanied by a Belgian colleague, went to the Brussels police station and listened to the police audio evidence, where nowhere does the word USB, or anything else, appear.”

6. Political family

As Kaili holds out in jail, the impact of her arrest continues to reverberate throughout the European Parliament, her Socialists and Democrats group and Greece’s PASOK party.

Several S&D members said the scandal, which implicates mainly current and former members of the group, had prompted a split in the ranks.

On one side is a contingent pushing for public self-scrutiny, including an internal investigation that would publicize its findings. On the other are lawmakers who argue such disclosures would bring further damage to the political movement, which is already under attack by the conservatives of the European People’s Party (EPP), the biggest group in the European Parliament.

One focus of intense debate is Kaili herself, and whether she was planning to leave the PASOK party she joined at 14 at the time of her arrest. According to Nikos Androulakis, the party’s current leader and only other member in the European Parliament, Kaili was no party stalwart, but a “Trojan horse” for Greece’s ruling center-right New Democracy party.

Androulakis, who expelled Kaili from PASOK after her arrest, points to comments she made minimizing the impact of a spying scandal that has rattled Greece’s government as proof that her true loyalties lay elsewhere. Kaili hadn’t attended any party functions since last July, he told POLITICO in December.

“Kaili was never really close to us,” Evriviadis Eleftheriadis, the PASOK secretary in Thessaloniki told POLITICO. “A lot of us were thinking that she should have been expelled even before the scandal but now it’s too late to say so anyways.”

Adding to the suspicions of her colleagues is the fact that Kaili broke with the group during a vote to elect the European Parliament’s secretary-general, Alessandro Chiocchetti, who previously served as the center-right Parliament President Metsola’s chief of staff. While the Socialists and Democrats group abstained during the vote, Kaili backed Chiocchetti. “That was completely outrageous how she acted,” said Katarina Barley, a German Social Democrat MEP and a vice president of the Parliament.

Asked about claims the Greek lawmaker was considering a leap over to New Democracy at the time of her arrest, Thanasis Bakolas, Secretary-General of the EPP, dismissed them as “nonsense.” “Kaili was PASOK establishment,” he said. He added that such a move would not have made sense in terms of “political timing.” Kaili’s second term in the European Parliament comes to an end in April 2024.

Kaili herself has yet to comment. Late last month, a Belgian judge denied her request to be let out of prison with an ankle bracelet, arguing that she could seek to leave Belgium or attempt to tamper with evidence. Despite frequent public statements from her lawyers, both in Greece and Belgium, the Greek lawmaker hasn’t granted any interviews since her arrest on December 9. Her lawyers have declined POLITICO’s requests to speak to her.

Whatever the outcome of her case, it’s no foregone conclusion that Kaili’s political career is over. Bakolas, the EPP secretary-general said that Kaili, pre-arrest, would have been courted after her term ended by corporate interests for board member positions thanks to her “hard work, intelligence and certainly to the fact that she was very much liked across the board.” 

Kaili remains a member of the European Parliament until further notice, and Greece is known to be forgiving to politicians tainted by graft scandals. In her hometown of Thessaloniki, according to PASOK Secretary Eleftheriadis, Kaili would have good a chance of being elected mayor, if she chose to run in an upcoming election. “It would be easy for her to be elected mayor. People seem to love that posh personality sometimes, but I believe this would be too local for her; if she returned to Greek politics, she would go for something bigger” he said.

Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting to this article.