Dad of Italy’s PM-elect smuggled 1500kg of drugs – reports

The estranged father of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prospective prime minister, was a drug smuggler who received a nine-year sentence after being caught with 1500kg of cannabis resin, Spanish media say.

The late Francesco Meloni walked out on her, her sister and her mother when she was a year old, Giorgia Meloni, 45, who led a right-wing coalition to victory in Sunday’s general election, has previously said. He sailed off to start a new life in the Canary Islands on a yacht named Crazy Horse.

Diario de Mallorca, a Spanish newspaper, reported that years later, in 1995, Meloni senior was arrested in the port of Mahon on Menorca after police discovered 50 bales of marijuana on board a yacht he had sailed from Morocco.

Citing court reports, the publication said Francesco had arrived in Menorca on the Cool Star with three people, including a new partner’s two children. In court, he said that the rest of the group were unaware he had picked up the drugs in Morocco.

He said he had decided to bring the drugs from north Africa after the restaurant business he had set up in the Canaries had gone bankrupt. In 2007 and 2011, despite his past, he ran for office in local elections in Mallorca, the paper reported.

After Francesco left, his wife, Anna Paratore, and their daughters, Giorgia and Arianna, moved from a wealthy neighbourhood in the north of the city to the working-class Garbatella area, where they lived on what Paratore earned from writing romance novels.

Giorgia and Arianna spent summer holidays with their father in the Canaries, but she has said the trips stopped when she was 11, long before his arrest. Meloni has never spoken of her father’s drug-smuggling conviction, but has described her cold relationship with him.

“My father did everything to ensure he wasn’t liked or respected – I would find it hard to say he was a good person,” she told an interviewer in 2018.

“I don’t like talking about him, but I will say that if an 11-year-old child decides she no longer wants to see her father and then never sees him again, it is obvious that man has done something.”

After her father died of leukaemia, Meloni said: “I feel no hatred or displeasure, I don’t feel anything. It’s as if a TV personality had died.”

Her father’s move to Spain did, however, influence her as she grew up, she revealed last year in her autobiography.

“The constant need to be at my best, to be accepted – above all in male company – and the fear of disappointing those who believe in me, probably comes from my father’s lack of love,” she wrote.

A spokeswoman said of the conviction: “Giorgia Meloni has nothing to say about this. As is known she stopped seeing her father when she was 11 and has had no contact with him since.

She has no idea of what he may have done and does not think she can be considered responsible for the actions of a man she chose not to see any more when she was a small girl.”

Source: The Times, London