Thailand to extradite Palazzolo

FUGITIVE Italian businessman and convict Vito Palazzolo, who also owns properties and has business interests in Namibia, is to be extradited from Thailand to Italy after spending more than one-and-a-half years in a Thai jail.

Palazzolo, who has been appealing against an extradition order which a Thai court granted a year ago authorising that he should be handed over to Italian authorities, will now be extradited, an Italian prosecutor is quoted as having said on Sunday.

“It has been a very long procedure,” Leonardo Agueci, the deputy chief prosecutor in Palermo in Sicily, was quoted by Italian media as saying.

The Sicily-born Palazzolo previously worked as a banker in Switzerland and was convicted in the 1980s of laundering proceeds from Mafia drug trafficking in an operation named the ‘Pizza Connection’.

Although Palazzolo (66) served three years in prison for the crime, Italian authorities have continued to pursue him with criminal charges following his release.

In 2009, Italy’s Supreme Court of Appeal upheld a conviction and a nine-year prison term which Palazzolo received in a Sicilian court in 2006 after a trial in absentia, on a charge of “participation in a Mafia type association”.

Prosecutors alleged that while working in Switzerland as a banker, Palazzolo laundered money for some of Italy’s top mobsters. Palazzolo has been denying the charge claiming that he is a victim of almost three decades of persecution by the Italian prosecuting authorities.

Palazzolo is accused of having been the “treasurer” for the last two godfathers of the Cosa Nostra who are now in jail – Bernardo Provenzano and Toto Riina, who led the Mafia in the 1980s and 1990s.

When he was sentenced, prosecutors in Palermo claimed Palazzolo was “one of the most important Cosa Nostra figures in 20 years, because of his key role between business and the Mafia”.

Having moved to South Africa under controversial circumstances in 1986, Palazzolo adopted the name Robert von Palace Kolbatschenko. He remained out of the reach of the Italian authorities until he visited Thailand in March last year. His freedom came to an end when he was detained at Bangkok airport, from where he was set to take a flight to South Africa, at the end of March last year.

He has been in a Thai prison since then, while unsuccessfully fighting legal steps to have him extradited to Italy.

Before being arrested in Thailand, Palazzolo managed his business interests in Namibia from an office in Windhoek, where he also owns a house in one of the city’s upmarket suburbs.

Palazzolo has acknowledged that in 1982, while working as a banker in Switzerland, he returned about US$6 million in funds to a Mafia boss after being threatened by the mob. He has said he was made a scapegoat in the ‘Pizza Connection’ case since he was the only Sicilian working in Swiss banks that were accused of laundering drug money for the mob.

Palazzolo was sentenced to a three-year prison term after a Swiss court convicted him in 1985 of having financed the illegal trafficking of narcotics. He served part of this sentence before he fled to South Africa in late 1986, but later returned to Switzerland to serve the remainder of the term.

The ‘Pizza Connection’ investigation broke a US$1,6 billion heroin and cocaine smuggling operation that used New York pizzerias as fronts from 1975 to 1984.

– AFP/AP/Own Report

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