THE HAGUE--Casino owner Francesco Corallo, through his lawyer Gerard Spong in the Netherlands, in July 2015 filed an official complaint against Member of the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament Ronald van Raak of the Socialist Party (SP).
At the time, Corallo accused Van Raak of defamation and insulting his person by calling him a mafia boss. Van Raak revealed this in his regular column that was published on the website ThePostOnline on Sunday. (http://politiek.tpo.nl)
“In July last year, I found a remarkable letter in my mailbox in The Hague. From the Spong law offices, with a formal complaint of libel and insult. Because I had called Francesco Corallo, a gambling entrepreneur in St. Maarten, a mafia boss,” stated Van Raak in his column.
The Member of Parliament (MP) said he frequently received peculiar mail, such as the internal memo of the Curaçao intelligence service VDC which stated that Corallo was connected to the Italian mafia and a letter of the Italian Ministry of Home Affairs which explained that Corallo was “involved in international drug trafficking” and “an important person in the Sicilian mafia.”
This information, according to the Italian ministry, was confirmed by the Italian police and the Italian secret service. “Through this kind of information I got the idea that Corallo had an important position within the mafia. Still, I received a complaint which Corallo had sent to the Court in The Hague on July 14, 2015,” stated Van Raak, who explained that the direct reason for this was his column that he published on ThePostOnline on July 8.
Van Raak said that Corallo’s complaint didn’t come as a surprise as lawyer Spong had warned him before not to use the term mafia boss. He said that such complaints and threats were part and parcel of the current atmosphere on the islands. “This culture has now also reached the Netherlands.”
According to Van Raak, “people like Corallo scatter threats and formal complaints” when someone brings up their “dubious practices.” “I am willing to stop calling Corallo a mafia boss, but I have no idea what else to call him. But, I am glad that the case against former Prime Minister Schotte sheds more light on Corallo’s practices.”
In a reaction Sunday evening, Van Raak said that he had heard nothing more of Corallo’s formal complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office. He said that complaints such as this one didn’t stop him from carrying out his work as a Member of the Second Chamber. “As an MP I feel it is my duty to speak out, to get things out in the open,” he told The Daily Herald.
In his column, Van Raak referred to last week’s trial against former Curaçao Prime Minister and NFK Leader Gerrit Schotte, who has been accused of, among other things, accepting money from Corallo in return for favours and to allegedly give the Italian businessman influence in local politics. “The most remarkable move was the attempt to have Rudolf Baetsen appointed as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Central Bank of Curaçao and St. Maarten.”
Van Raak has written several times before about Corallo, Schotte and the links between crime and politics in Curaçao and St. Maarten. According to the MP, the remarks of the Curaçao Prosecutor during the Schotte trial, who was described as a marionette of Corallo, confirmed what he has been saying all along: that there are close links between the underworld and upper world in Curaçao and St. Maarten.
The Second Chamber in April last year adopted a motion of Van Raak and his colleague André Bosman of the liberal democratic VVD party requesting the Dutch Government to initiate a large-scale investigation of the alleged ties between the underworld and upper world in Curaçao and St. Maarten, in particular the relations between politics and the gambling industry.
