The European Parliament has drawn a line through the middle of the biggest corruption case it has faced in years. On 16 June, MEPs voted by secret ballot to strip the immunity of Fulvio Martusciello, an Italian member of the centre-right European People's Party, by 344 votes to 234 with 25 abstentions. In the same sitting, they voted to keep the protections of three colleagues, citing what they called a "flagrant scarcity of concrete elements" in the prosecutors' request.
The three who keep their immunity are Salvatore De Meo (Italy, EPP), Daniel Attard (Malta, Socialists and Democrats) and Nikola Minchev (Bulgaria, Renew). For Belgian investigators, the decision blocks their most promising line of inquiry: questioning the lawmakers directly.
The investigation broke into the open in March 2025, when Belgian police raided more than 20 addresses and sealed two offices inside the European Parliament. According to the investigation by Follow the Money, Knack and Le Soir, around 15 current and former MEPs are suspected of accepting football tickets, lavish trips to China and possibly cash in exchange for promoting Huawei's positions as the EU debated whether to curb the company's role in 5G networks.
Four people have been charged with bribery and membership of a criminal organisation, and a fifth with money laundering. The main suspect is Valerio Ottati, a former Huawei lobbyist. Prosecutors allege associates paid MEPs to sign a 2021 letter backing Huawei's technology — with €15,000 said to have been offered to the letter's author and €1,500 to each co-signatory.
The Parliament's legal affairs committee sat on the immunity requests for more than a year, demanding more detailed evidence and insisting it had to check the requests were not politically motivated. Belgian federal prosecutor Ann Fransen pushed back, warning that handing over detailed evidence could compromise the investigation and tip off suspects. It is a catch-22: prosecutors must request a waiver as soon as suspicions arise, yet cannot gather the proof the Parliament demands until that waiver is granted. One of the cases, against Attard, turned out to rest on mistaken identity — prosecutors had confused him with a namesake.
After the Qatargate cash-for-influence scandal of 2022, the Parliament promised full cooperation with investigators. Three years on, the door is closing again. The campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory says the institution has learned nothing about ethics enforcement. Even Huawei has said it "regrets that the immunity proceedings at the European Parliament linger," preventing authorities from putting questions to the MEPs — a remarkable position for a company under investigation to take.
The vote exposes the tension at the heart of the Parliament: it writes Europe's transparency rules, then protects its own from scrutiny. The backdrop is geopolitical. Brussels is still trying to turn its recommendation against Chinese telecom suppliers into binding law, with Germany and Spain resisting and Beijing threatening retaliation. The probe is not dead — Martusciello can now be questioned — but its central thread is frozen for as long as the other three remain in office.
