Francesco Meloni, father of the winner of the general elections held last Sunday in Italy, was sentenced in Palma, Mallorca, to a nine-year prison sentence for drug trafficking after being arrested in the port of Maó, Menorca. He was carrying a shipment of 1,500 kilos of hashish on a ship in which he traveled with part of his family more than 25 years ago, according to the Diario de Mallorca.
The father of the far-right leader Giorgia Meloni, whom he abandoned to go to the Canary Islands in the 1980s, assumed full responsibility for the events during the trial that was held in 1996. At the hearing he also wanted to exculpate the two sons of his then couple and his son-in-law who accompanied him, although they were sentenced to four years in prison.
At the same time, the same year in France, a television presented a certain Giorgia, a 19-year-old girl who was active in the National Alliance, a new version of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement. She distributed pamphlets against the left and defended that "Mussolini was a good politician". But at that time, eight years ago the young woman had broken all contact with her father, as she herself has written in her memoirs.
According to the prosecutor's letter mentioned in the Mallorcan newspaper, Maloni Sr. rented a French-flagged sailboat in France, the Cool Star, in which he loaded 1,500 kilos of hashish from another boat that anchored in Moroccan territorial waters. From there they headed for Italy, the final destination of the shipment, but were surprised by a storm and had to take refuge in the port of Maó, where they were detained on September 25, 1995 by agents of the Customs Surveillance Service. In addition to the drug, 7,533,000 Italian liras (about 3,900 euros), 45 pounds (about 50 euros at current exchange rates) and 74,000 pesetas (about 444 euros) were seized on the sailboat.
A year after being accused of smuggling and public health crimes for what was until then one of the largest drug seizures in the Balearic Islands, the Provincial Court of Palma tried him. At trial, Meloni acknowledged responsibility for the events and assured that he had deceived his relatives to embark on the journey with the excuse of making a family trip. He said they had angrily asked him to dock at the port of Maó after learning of the shipment.
Meloni Sr. went to Spain almost 40 years ago, leaving behind his wife and two daughters (Giorgia and Arianna). He settled first on the island of La Gomera and then in Mallorca, where he even tried to participate in politics when he was part of the electoral lists of the Escons en Blanc formation in two electoral calls in 2007 and 2011. During the trial for drug trafficking, he argued that he had lost several of his businesses in the Canary Islands, including a restaurant, and that he had contracted significant debts that he intended to settle with the transport of the drug stash, with which he hoped to earn 50 million pesetas (about 300,500 euros).
The leader of the Brothers of Italy has spoken on several occasions about her childhood and also about her father, who died two years ago without resuming contact with his daughter. When Giorgia Meloni reached the age of 11, she decided that she would never see her father again, whom they visited with her sister two weeks a year. During her last stay in La Gomera, her father had left by boat and had left them in charge of her wife at the time, who was not much for the work. The far-right has once linked her ideals about the traditional family and against the adoption rights of single-parent or homosexual families, with her past and the abandonment of her father. A man who, by the way, had libertarian ideas and was an atheist.
