Mani Pulite, Swiss accounts and the reputation crisis of the 1990s

Tangentopoli reaches Lugano

On 17 February 1992 the Milan prosecutors arrested Mario Chiesa, the socialist president of a Milan old people's home, while he was taking a bribe. The case opened the investigation known as Mani Pulite and the scandal called Tangentopoli, "bribesville", which within two years destroyed the parties that had governed Italy since 1945.¹ The Milan pool of prosecutors, among them Antonio Di Pietro, found that bribes paid by companies to politicians and parties for public contracts had often been paid abroad, and that the most common destination was a Swiss bank account. The investigation therefore depended on Swiss mutual assistance from its first months: in the Chiesa case itself Di Pietro found and had seized two Swiss accounts named "Levissima" and "Fiuggi". As requests from Milan reached Swiss prosecutors in Lugano and the other financial centres, Swiss courts had to decide in many cases whether the facts described in the requests, often presented as corruption combined with false accounting and illegal party financing, corresponded to offences under Swiss law.²

Corruption was a felony under Swiss law, and the Swiss courts granted assistance in most of the cases. The prosecutors in Lugano were in a particular position, because some of the accounts used for payments to Italian politicians had been opened at Lugano banks and were held through local intermediaries. The best known of them, the conto Protezione, is described below.³ Since the bribes had been paid from the "black funds" of Italian companies, which were themselves often held in Switzerland, the investigation of the bribes also brought to light the undeclared assets of the paying companies. Here the fiscal exception set a limit: information on tax evasion could not be used by the Italian authorities under the principle of speciality.

The conto Protezione

The most famous of the accounts connected with Lugano predates Mani Pulite but was clarified only in its course. Account no. 633369 at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Lugano, known as the conto Protezione, received the large bribe that Roberto Calvi paid to the Italian Socialist Party. According to the court records, Calvi had paid bribes to Bettino Craxi and Claudio Martelli in 1980, when a liquidity crisis of his bank was resolved by a new loan of USD 50 million from the state energy group ENI. Silvano Larini, a confidant of Craxi, held the account. For many years the Milan judges tried without success to establish who stood behind it.⁴ After a warrant was issued against him in May 1992, Larini stayed abroad. On 7 February 1993 he surrendered to Antonio Di Pietro at the border at Ventimiglia and described his role. His statements, which Licio Gelli confirmed, led Martelli to resign as Minister of Justice on 10 February 1993. In the separate proceedings on the Ambrosiano bankruptcy that followed, the convictions of Larini, Gelli and Leonardo Di Donna for complicity in fraudulent bankruptcy became final in 2003, while the charge against Martelli was time-barred. The Corte di Cassazione set aside Craxi's eight-year sentence in 1999 and referred the case back, after which the proceedings against him were closed in 2000 because of his death.⁵ Craxi, who had been definitively convicted in other cases of corruption and illegal party financing, died in Hammamet in Tunisia on 19 January 2000 without having returned to Italy.

The case linked the three stories told in this chapter. Money from the Banco Ambrosiano group, whose Lugano subsidiary had been part of Calvi's network, had flowed through a Lugano bank to the political protectors of the bank's chairman. Gelli, the leader of the P2 lodge whom Switzerland had been unable to extradite for criminal association, confirmed the payments and was himself convicted in the proceedings. The full story came to light only through the corruption investigations of the 1990s and the cooperation between Milan and Swiss authorities.

Notes

1. "Mani pulite", Italian Wikipedia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_pulite (consulted as a last resort; arrest of Mario Chiesa, "presidente del Pio Albergo Trivulzio", on 17 February 1992; pool of Antonio Di Pietro, Gherardo Colombo and Pier Camillo Davigo, coordinated by Gerardo D'Ambrosio). ↩
2. "Mani pulite", Italian Wikipedia (as above) (Di Pietro "aveva scoperto e messo sotto sequestro due conti svizzeri, Levissima e Fiuggi"). ↩
3. "Banco Ambrosiano", Italian Wikipedia (as above) (the "famoso 'Conto Protezione' di Lugano"). Individual intermediaries are not named here. ↩
4. "Silvano Larini", Italian Wikipedia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvano_Larini (consulted as a last resort; "titolare del conto corrente Ubs 633369 in Svizzera (alias 'conto protezione')"); "Banco Ambrosiano", Italian Wikipedia (as above) ("Conto Protezione" di Lugano "su cui transitò la maxi-tangente versata da Roberto Calvi al PSI"; ENI loan of USD 50 million in 1980, for which Calvi, "come risulta dagli atti processuali, pagò tangenti a Claudio Martelli e Bettino Craxi"); "Claudio Martelli", Italian Wikipedia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudio_Martelli ("per quindici anni i giudici di Milano avevano invano indagato"). ↩
5. "Silvano Larini", Italian Wikipedia (as above) (warrant of May 1992; surrender to Di Pietro at Ventimiglia on 7 February 1993; "chiamate in correità (confermate da Licio Gelli)"); "Claudio Martelli", Italian Wikipedia (as above) (resignation on 10 February 1993 after an avviso di garanzia for the Ambrosiano bankruptcy); "Banco Ambrosiano", Italian Wikipedia (as above), citing "Martelli, reato prescritto per il Conto Protezione", la Repubblica, 27 February 2003 (convictions of Di Donna, Larini and Gelli final in 2003; time bar for Martelli; Craxi's sentence "annullata con rinvio dalla Corte di Cassazione nel 1999", proceedings "dichiarato estinto nel 2000 per decesso dell'imputato"); "Bettino Craxi", Italian Wikipedia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettino_Craxi (two final convictions "per corruzione e finanziamento illecito"; death in Hammamet on 19 January 2000). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.