“Ghost” cargo, full of unnamed goods. Planes took off from China and arrived in Italy with documents that only mentioned “medical aid,” “healthcare material,” “commercial goods,” or “humanitarian products.” Phrases good for some social media live streams, much less for understanding what was really in the hold: which masks, how many, produced by whom, on behalf of which consortium, destined for whom. This is where the big gap in the investigation into the emergency Covid flights during Giuseppe Conte’s government starts. The planes are visible. The routes, almost. The goods, often, remain shrouded in fog. And when the Guardia di Finanza tries to line up authorizations, flight numbers, intermediate stops, and transport letters, the picture shatters. “Knowing that a plane was authorized to fly does not mean knowing what it was carrying,” an investigator explains to Libero, “nor who sent the goods, who was supposed to receive them, and who organized the trip.” A non-trivial detail considering that the protective devices were purchased by the extraordinary commissioner, Domenico Arcuri, drawing from the bottomless well of public money.
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To understand what was really flying, the Air Waybills were needed, the air transport letters. These are the documents indicating sender, recipient, weight, number of packages, and nature of the shipment. Where they were recovered, the mystery disappears: for 15 private missions of Neos, for example, the Air Waybills link the loads to Wenzhou Light, Wenzhou Moon-Ray, and Luokai Trade, the three consortia under investigation. For World Cargo, other documents lead to Byd and Copag. Fifteen documented flights, however, are a lit match in a cave. Where those documents are missing, there remains a void. The most evident case, the military write in a report, concerns Winner Italia and an Alitalia flight organized to transport 135 cubic meters of material. In the records, it was not possible to reconstruct either what was on board or which Chinese company had shipped it. There is the trip, there is the order, there is the plane. The cargo, however, remains without identity.
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And the “mystery” thickens when moving from cargo to flight codes. The Guardia di Finanza, during the investigations, asked Enac to verify the numbers related to 16 companies. For six carriers El Al, Asl Airlines Belgium, Asiana, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, and Korean Air – those codes were not authorized. Possible? The Civil Aviation Authority explained that the planes could have departed from China, made a stopover in another country, and continued towards Italy with a different numbering, valid only for the last leg: Shanghai-Tel Aviv with one code, Tel Aviv-Rome with another. Chaos. Making everything more complicated was then the cyberattack on Enac in July 2020. The protocol remained blocked for about a month.
Authorizations continued to be issued, but in some cases took the shortcut of communication “via email.” Not an illegality in itself, but the trigger of another critical issue: a search limited to the ordinary archive might not return all the authorizations actually granted. And so, indeed, it was. Meanwhile, the cargoes kept arriving. And many documents, analyzed by the Guardia di Finanza, were content with descriptions so broad as to say almost nothing. “Medical aid” can mean masks, gloves, gowns, machinery, or other material. “Commercial goods” is even more elastic. For example: the holds could have been full of chips or hammers or other items. No one would have ever known then or now.
In this no-man’s land, the brokers of the three consortia that sold our country substandard masks for 1.25 billion euros also moved. Contrary to what Arcuri, Giuseppe Conte, and other Invitalia officials first and then the commissioner’s structure swore, the brokers were active participants in organizing the mega order and even in logistics. For sure, it is known that the letters signed by Arcuri for the purchase of the lots were sent by the structure to one of the suspects and used to reassure the Neos company about the flight plan booked. In fact, El Al contracts were recovered on the computers of one of the intermediaries. And the WhatsApp chats in the records show coordination activity among intermediaries, carriers, and suppliers.
An overlap of roles between public and private, between official and hidden actors that multiplied the steps, confused the papers, and sowed chaos. “The commissioner’s structure had to keep the file of its orders and execution,” the source continues, “while Enac had to keep the authorization file; carriers and logistics operators had to maintain the transport documents under their responsibility; just as Customs had to keep import declarations: if the documents are missing or do not match,” it concludes, “this was great luck for those who had something to hide…”
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