Gianluca Savoini, the political operative at the center of the storm over a secret plan to fund the far-right party of Italy’s deputy prime minister with Russian oil money, shuttled back and forth to Moscow on multiple mysterious trips last year that raise fresh questions about his links to Russia and the true purpose of his visits.



A joint investigation by BuzzFeed News, the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, and Russian news site the Insider has established that Savoini, a longtime aide to Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, flew to Moscow on three separate occasions in the seven weeks running up to the crucial meeting at the Metropol Hotel in October at which the proposed covert oil deal was discussed. He made a further three trips to Russia in the weeks immediately following.



Salvini did not attend the Metropol meeting, which took place Oct. 18, but he was in Moscow at the time. He has consistently refused to answer questions about whether he knew the meeting was taking place or was aware of the proposed oil deal. He has repeatedly insisted that he did not know what Savoini was doing in Moscow.

But BuzzFeed News, Bellingcat, and the Insider can now reveal that a member of Salvini’s ministerial staff, Claudio D’Amico, was booked on the same Aeroflot flight as Savoini from Milan to Moscow on Oct. 16 — SU2411 — and on the same return flight — SU2414 — the evening of Oct. 18, following the meeting at the Metropol that morning. D’Amico is Salvini’s strategic adviser on international affairs.

The revelation will ratchet up pressure on Salvini to answer questions about what he knew about the Moscow negotiation.



The data comes from analysis of Savoini's and D’Amico’s flight booking records, cross-referenced with their social media activity. It reveals that Savoini has made an extraordinary number of trips to Russia over the last five years, with at least 14 visits in 2018 alone and a further three in the first three months of this year. On many occasions, he stayed for no more than a night or two, the records show.

It is not known who paid for the flights, whom Savoini met when he was in Moscow, or whether Salvini knew about the visits.

Savoini has worked with Salvini, the leader of the Lega party and Europe’s most powerful far-right leader, for 20 years and has been described as his “sherpa to Moscow.”

It can also be revealed that Savoini's dozens of travel entries over the past five years do not appear in Russia’s Central Database for the Registration of Foreigners, known as the "migrant database.”

This database is maintained by the Russian interior ministry on the basis of mandatory landing cards that must be filled in by any noncitizens arriving in the country. In accordance with Russian law, any visiting foreigner must be registered into the central database, along with their travel data, such as visa number, passport data, port, and time of entry and exit.

The absence of such data for Savioni suggests either that he had a special status awarded upon arrival to individuals who, for example, don’t have to go through passport control or that the information was wiped from the database.

Last month, BuzzFeed News published the contents of an explosive recording of the Oct. 18 Metropol meeting in which Savoini and five other men — two other Italians and three Russians — discussed in detail the plan to covertly channel tens of millions of dollars from an oil deal to sustain Lega’s European election campaign. BuzzFeed News has also released the entire transcript of the recording.

After the story was published, Italian prosecutors announced that they had been investigating the proposed oil deal since February. According to reports in Italian media, Savoini, who is Salvini’s former spokesperson, is under investigation for international corruption along with the two other Italian men — an international lawyer called Gianluca Meranda and Francesco Vannucci, a consultant and banking expert — who came forward after the BuzzFeed News report was published, saying that they’d attended the meeting at the Metropol Hotel with Savoini. They all deny wrongdoing and say a deal was never completed.

Savoini did not respond to a request for comment and a detailed set of questions emailed to him by BuzzFeed News.