Late final yr, Florentine prosecutors lastly recognized a fugitive by the bloated corpse washed up months earlier than on a seashore close to Dubai, bare and with most of its pores and skin lacking.
However an official DNA match to Samuele Landi, previously the boss of considered one of Italy’s prime telecom corporations, solely deepened the thriller of his life.
Landi was a telecoms entrepreneur turned fraudster and fugitive who burned a path from Italy to west Africa to the Center East over the course of a decade.
The story of his life is vibrant and sophisticated — from a small-time dealmaker with an obvious sideline in cellphone intercourse chatrooms, to diplomat and alleged acquaintance of sheikhs and presidents. Whilst he managed to keep away from being dropped at justice by worldwide authorities, he labored on a plan to promote carbon credit to Emirati royalty.
However after Landi’s final try at a redemption commerce went south, he determined to pursue his fortunes on the excessive seas. He deliberate to dwell the remainder of his days in worldwide waters, with a quixotic dream of mining bitcoin by solar energy on a flotilla held along with large rubber bands.
His obvious loss of life at sea helps shine a lightweight on the gray areas in worldwide regulation and commerce the place it’s doable for unorthodox characters to pursue profitable alternatives and beliefs of private freedom, with little regard for nationwide legal guidelines.
On the seafront of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, is a crumbling villa, constructed on sand and now sinking quick, the ocean seeping additional into its cracked concrete foundations with each flip of the tide. It was constructed by Landi across the time of the worldwide monetary disaster.
I visited hoping it’d maintain clues as to how this maverick govt had come to safe his standing as considered one of West Africa’s prime diplomats within the Center East.
However “now’s no good”, stated a thin man in lime-coloured trousers, who appeared on the villa holding a pair of keys. Two extra males emerged from behind the home, one carrying a sizeable kitchen knife and a truncheon. They needed to know why I used to be making an attempt to “break in” to a useless man’s flooded home at nightfall.
The guards had been watching the property since Landi’s disappearance. As soon as put comfortable, they needed to grasp who he was, and what he did for Liberia. They led the way in which inside, via garish yellow and turquoise rooms. Salt water splashed via a gaping gap within the entrance room at excessive tide. In all places the ceiling was beginning to fall in. Painted lobster shells, grapes and slices of lemon danced on the terracotta tiles within the kitchen.
Within the late 2000s, Landi’s companies had been doing a roaring commerce. Born right into a rich household in Arezzo, a hilltop city in Tuscany, he had made his early fortunes with Plugit, which offered dial-up web with a side-hustle in erotic chat rooms. In his spare time, he competed in off-road automotive races throughout Africa.
In 2004 the corporate modified its title to Eutelia following the acquisition of a rival, with Landi serving variously as chief govt and director.
In Italy, Eutelia laid fibre-optic cables and have become one its largest telecoms operators. However its heyday was shortlived. By 2008, Italian authorities had been investigating Eutelia’s accounting practices.
Prosecutors would later say that Landi helped orchestrate the sale of Eutelia’s failing IT enterprise to a subsidiary, Agile, in June 2009, after piling it with debt. He was additionally alleged to have helped falsify invoices and prices price €2.4mn within the previous years, contributing to Eutelia’s later demise.
In Eutelia’s annual accounts from the time and the accompanying court docket paperwork, one nation is talked about repeatedly. Prosecutors stated hundreds of thousands had been misplaced in a Liberian “accounting desert”, together with for the acquisition of a aircraft. Liberia can also be the place Eutelia allegedly ran a part of an operation to inflate its phone visitors, in trade for charges that might have been price greater than €1mn from one other operator.
Landi’s companies used unorthodox means to get callers to remain on the road in his Liberian operations. At a name centre not removed from the positioning of the Monrovian villa, a whole lot of younger ladies as soon as labored the telephones in three shift patterns.
The typical wage was round $50 every week, however the longer they may maintain the boys phoning in, the extra they acquired paid, in keeping with Charles Konneh, who managed “Liberia Name Centre Inbound”. Landi was the last word boss of the operation, flying in along with his household for a go to and staying on the five-star Cape lodge on the opposite facet of city.
James Harding Giahyue, editor of The DayLight newspaper, despatched a younger feminine pal to work on the name centre, considering he had discovered her a good job. “It was a intercourse enterprise, however extra of a telecoms enterprise,” he stated. “It was uncooked, the boys might say something.” (Konneh denied the conversations had been sexual.)
Landi made his final reported public look in Italy in November 2009, when he had a confrontation with laid-off workers at his workplace buildings in Rome. It was additionally the beginning of a authorized battle lasting effectively over a decade, leading to a jail sentence for eight years that he by no means served.
By the summer time of 2010, Eutelia and Agile had been formally bankrupt. The Monrovia name centre shut down abruptly across the identical time, Konneh says. He dumped its computer systems within the villa, from the place he says they had been stolen. By that point, Landi had fled to Dubai. He was declared a fugitive by the Italian court docket system — and stored a low profile for eight years.
However Landi’s involvement with Liberia didn’t finish there.
The nation’s financial system bears the scars of 14 years of brutal civil conflict that had resulted in 2003. Offshore oilfield exploration has but to yield a commercial success and in 2018, when former worldwide soccer star George Weah was elected president, the nation nonetheless lacked dependable roads and a purposeful well being system.
Weah wanted to draw international funding. His greatest shot? The United Arab Emirates, which needed to splash its oil winnings to realize affect in Africa. The UAE was the final place Weah had played professionally earlier than retirement.
Weah additionally had shut ties to Italy. The primary and solely African winner of Fifa’s World Participant of the 12 months award, Weah had left a mark at AC Milan, the place he performed within the Nineteen Nineties.
By 2018, Landi was constructing a digital safety profession in Dubai. Fingers in Italian, Emirati and Liberian enterprise circles meant he was effectively positioned to play the function of intermediary within the African nation’s plans to draw funding.
There was one drawback. The UAE had begun taking steps to finalise an extradition treaty with Italy — whereas Landi was nonetheless a needed man at house.
Landi managed to acquire a Liberian diplomatic passport, finally with the title of consul basic to Dubai, in keeping with two Liberian diplomats. The appointment was with Weah’s backing, they stated. Below Liberia’s structure, all consul nominations have to be authorised by the president. This gave the fugitive businessman a level of diplomatic immunity.
At first the connection was mutually useful. Landi grew to become a “lobbier for the nation as an entire”, stated a diplomat who labored with Landi. He was in command of licensing the usage of Liberia’s flag to ships based mostly within the Center East and components of the Mediterranean, together with Greece and Turkey.
Liberia is likely one of the world’s hottest flags of comfort, providing ship house owners fast and low cost entry to registration in a rustic which will provide extra discretion than their very own.
Landi was the “quiet” and “very humble” man who was at all times on the town to make the lifetime of presidential envoys in Dubai simpler, stated Trokon Kpui, a minister beneath Weah.
And he acquired outcomes. The UAE agreed to pay for a $20mn solar-powered hospital, sports activities amenities and convoys of navy vehicles for Liberia. Landi negotiated the sort of deal on behalf of Weah’s authorities, together with the hospital, stated George Nixon Kingsley, a pal of Landi’s in Liberia.
Kpui, nonetheless, stated that the sort of deal was “probably not carried out via Landi,” however was as an alternative negotiated because of Weah’s “private relationship” with the UAE and with its management.
Commenting on Landi’s relationship to Weah, he stated: “Whereas it’s true Landi might need served in that [consul] place . . . he introduced personally to George Weah nothing.”
An individual who represents Weah didn’t present a remark.
The passport appeared to maintain Landi secure. Though Italy issued a request for arrest and extradition to Emirati authorities for Landi in April 2019, he was capable of proceed residing in Dubai. The Italian international ministry informed the FT it solely “ascertained” that Landi held a Liberian passport greater than two years later.
On the identical time, Landi and his spouse Laura Gallorini had been additionally cultivating their very own community regionally. Landi began working as an adviser to an organization owned by Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al-Maktoum, a Dubai royal and an vitality investor with a particular deal with West Africa.
In 2018, Landi had turn into the only shareholder of Liberia Vitality Inexperienced, a renewable vitality distributor, incorporation paperwork present. The next yr he appeared in a photograph taken to verify that the Abu Dhabi state-backed renewable vitality firm Masdar would grant $4mn to Liberia alongside the UAE authorities and a UN company. Masdar stated that Landi had attended in his capability as consul basic for Liberia.
Landi additionally labored for Dubai-based cyber safety firm Kryptotel, which stated it produced the primary “crypto cellphone” within the Center East and Africa, providing international governments military-grade encryption.
He proclaimed his innocence to anybody who would pay attention, together with in an look by video name on a pill held by his lawyer Amedeo di Segni at a press conference referred to as in Arezzo’s city sq. in September 2019.
“This man had a whole lot of creativeness,” with out being “essentially very clever”, says Jan de Smet, an impartial Dutch investigator who researched Landi’s life as a part of his work on deforestation and corruption.
“He had this charisma factor over him and naturally the aura of the adventurer, the profitable adventurer . . . which was engaging possibly.”
Landi’s Liberian passport had been his protect. However its assure started to look much less sure, prompting his most dramatic transfer but.
After a Liberian nationwide was arrested and later convicted of cash laundering and wire fraud within the US in April 2022, Liberian embassies obtained orders to evaluation the allocation of diplomatic passports and to disclaim honorary positions to these beneath prison investigation.
Liberian authorities threatened to confiscate Landi’s passport, the diplomat who labored with Landi stated, leaving him susceptible once more to arrest and extradition.
Rising more and more determined, Landi moved in December 2022 on to a second-hand barge off the coast of Dubai in what he described as worldwide waters. He began working from there, joking that individuals must swim to achieve the consulate, whose workplace constructing he shut down.
Just some weeks in, a storm struck, leaving Landi and his crew surviving off fish for almost a month. They later laughed on the incident, calling the barge “Purring Island” after the cats who had survived with them.
Weah’s international minister Dee-Maxwell Saah Kemayah was much less amused, and accused Landi of underperforming on the much less glamorous sides of his diplomatic job. He was, for example, unable to barter on behalf of Liberian employees who had overstayed their visas in Dubai, as he was too nervous to go to the police station in individual.
His request to be promoted to ambassador was vetoed by the UAE due to considerations about his court docket circumstances in Italy and the very fact he remained an Italian citizen, the 2 diplomats stated.
Working to maintain his choices open on dry land, he tried to faucet different highly effective contacts in Dubai.
In early 2023, Landi labored on a deal that might have given Emirati royal Maktoum’s firm Blue Carbon unique rights to generate and promote carbon credit on about 1mn hectares of Liberian land. Blue Carbon would obtain 70 per cent of the worth of the credit, in keeping with a draft proposal drawn up in July 2023.
Across the time the proposal was finalised, Landi obtained contemporary reassurances about his passport, one diplomat who labored with Landi stated.
Blue Carbon informed the FT in a press release that it had not had any involvement in or affect over “the diplomatic standing or the private affairs of Mr. Landi”. His recommendation to the corporate had targeted on block chain verification of environmental belongings.
“Any of Mr. Landi’s connections in regard to Liberia, had been impartial to and never tied to any discussions of potential alternatives between Blue Carbon and the Liberian Authorities,” it stated.
Landi’s time residing on a barge apparently kindled an curiosity in seasteading, or making a life in worldwide waters.
He had helped construct a blockchain ledger for the self-proclaimed micronation of Liberland, a libertarian settlement based mostly on a land-bank between Croatia and Serbia, and have become pleasant with its “president” the Czech politician Vít Jedlička.
In November 2023 Jedlička visited Landi’s floating embassy. The waters had been uneven and two fishermen and a yacht salesman had refused to sail him there. Ultimately, he had hitched a journey on the speedboat that stored the barge provided with fruit and greens.
As waves buffeted the tiny craft, Jedlička, with a blond beard reduce right into a neat goatee, bumped about on an uncomfortable bench, looking for a spot the place his baby-blue linen jacket might keep away from being splashed. After about an hour, Landi hauled a moist Jedlička up the makeshift ladder on to the barge.
The 72m by 20m vessel was pocked with orange rust damage. However Landi felt he was effectively arrange there. For a lot of the yr he had been utilizing a Starlink satellite tv for pc connection to juggle his diplomatic roles in Dubai and Liberia. Landi had a desalination plant for water and photo voltaic panels for vitality, he individually informed Jedlička in an amateur video interview.
Landi’s long-term plan was to maneuver a bigger barge out via the Gulf of Oman and hundreds of miles south via the Indian Ocean nearer to the Saya de Malha, a sandbank the place he would use large rubber bands to tie a community of barges collectively, making a floating city.
He set out these plans to Oswald Horowitz, a freelance documentary maker who hung out with Landi on his barge that yr to make a function about his life.
Jedlička, who hoped this could act as “a back-up territory in case of any hassle in Europe”, stated Landi promised to fly the flag of Liberland. The flotilla would use photo voltaic vitality to mine bitcoin tax-free and promote carbon credit.
The 2 males talked all through the afternoon, excessive on what Jedlička referred to as the “intercourse enchantment” of making their very own techniques of presidency at sea, far exterior the reaches of the EU’s creeping forms and even of Dubai’s notoriously light-touch strategy to taxes.
In the meantime, two crew members labored underwater to weld shut holes in air tanks that the storm earlier within the yr had prompted. Jedlička stated his goodbyes, realizing that Landi had stayed longer than deliberate on a ship that was more and more leaky.
In late 2023, Weah’s authorities misplaced a decent basic election and Landi’s entry to a passport was threatened once more.
Sara Beysolow Nyanti, Liberia’s new international minister, launched a campaign shortly after taking workplace to revoke improperly distributed diplomatic passports. Nyanti refused to permit even her personal safety employees to make use of diplomatic passports for quick monitor via airports, a diplomat and a former lawmaker stated. Individuals near Nyanti didn’t present a remark.
To make issues worse, the Blue Carbon deal didn’t transfer ahead. The FT and different retailers reported on the finish of 2023 that communities who believed the land belonged to them had not been properly consulted on the deal. Blue Carbon denied failing to seek the advice of with communities.
“Carbon credit have been cursed round right here,” stated Wilson Tarpeh, who was head of the Environmental Safety Company on the time of the deal and flew out to satisfy Landi in Dubai to debate it. “Anybody who has tried to do them spherical right here will get crushed up.”
Tarpeh stated he suggested in opposition to the deal however was overruled by Weah’s prime brass. Once we met in Monrovia’s enterprise district, Tarpeh jabbed at an outsized calculator on his desk to point out me the various hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon wealth that might be protected in Liberia’s inside.
However Rudolph Merab, head of Liberia’s Forestry Growth Authority, informed me that, because of the shortage of curiosity from western consumers, “we have not seen one cent from the carbon we are absorbing from the forests”. He has been looking for new consumers for the credit however says he has lately been supplied solely $1 a tonne, effectively under the market value.
Merab’s logging firm on the time was named in former dictator Charles Taylor’s conflict crimes trial as an alleged conduit for money to arm and direct Sierra Leone’s civil conflict. Merab denies that he or the corporate supported the conflict. He stated: “I’d by no means assist a president combating conflict. Nothing I did was hidden from anyone.”
In February 2024, quickly after the collapse of the deal and the change of presidency, storms whipped the coast of Dubai.
Landi’s daughter Saahra informed Horowitz, the documentary maker, that her father’s barge had been break up in two, moments after she had spoken to him by video.
A physique discovered by coastguards at Umm al Quwain up the coast from Dubai was registered as Landi, regardless of being “completely unrecognisable” as a consequence of lacking pores and skin, in keeping with an individual who has seen the preliminary post-mortem report.
UAE police had been gradual to reply. A loss of life certificates was issued on Could 9, months after the loss of life it declared on February 7, Italy’s international affairs ministry stated. Italy’s request for a DNA take a look at was turned down by the UAE following opposition by Landi’s spouse Laura, it added.
The UAE international ministry and Dubai’s authorities didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Two diplomats informed me that Landi’s spouse, Laura, declined handy in Landi’s passport and stopped returning calls. The embassy employees weren’t invited to any funeral, whereas Laura didn’t affirm whether or not he had died, even to Landi’s driver, they stated.
The FT was unable to achieve Laura instantly for remark.
These closest to Landi had been struggling final yr to course of occasions, weighing up all of the potential causes Landi had for selecting to vanish, alongside those who his enemies might need for wishing he’d disappear.
Landi had faked his personal loss of life twice earlier than and used the storm as a chance to do that for a 3rd time, one of many diplomats alleged.
“I’ve so many doubts that he’s really useless,” Saahra informed Italy’s state-owned broadcaster Rai in Could. After seeing the physique, Saahra’s brother stated “it wasn’t him”, she informed the TV broadcast.
Amedeo di Segni, the lawyer who stated he represented Landi till final yr, informed the FT by e-mail that he had “critical doubts about whether or not Samuele Landi is really gone.”
He later stated the FT’s model of occasions contained “a wealth of right info, however a few of it’s fully incorrect, some may be very incomplete and a few important procedural particulars are lacking”. He declined to make clear additional with out fee.
However for the libertarians who adopted Landi’s journeys, there was a quite simple rationalization for his disappearance: a cavalier angle to security at sea.
Landi’s barge “was rusting 3 times sooner than it ought to have been, it was simply dangerous luck with a nasty product from China”, stated Jedlička, the Liberland president.
Lastly, late final yr, the UAE agreed to ship the physique for forensic evaluation. Italy’s international affairs ministry stated a DNA take a look at ordered by the Florence Public Prosecutor’s Workplace confirmed that the physique was Landi’s.
Segni informed me he had been knowledgeable by Florence’s attorney-general that the physique was Landi’s — however that an post-mortem report on explanation for loss of life had but to be filed.
“That’s deep,” regulator Wilson Tarpeh stated, after I requested whether or not there was any method Landi might nonetheless be alive. “Perhaps he went via some metamorphosis, whenever you resurface someplace with a brand new identification.”
Now he considered it, he was unsure if he remembered assembly Landi in spite of everything.
Further reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome and Chloe Cornish in Dubai
