“The Untameable”: who is the judge of Qatargate? A Don Quixote who has already condemned the giants

Quixote, Elliot Ness, incorruptible, indomitable. The explosion of Qatargate, the scandal of The Qatari bribes that have been shaking the European Parliament for days are putting the media in the spotlight Michele Clairea Belgian investigating judge known in plat pays for years for don’t be afraid of anyone.

Claise is a nice character. “An accident”, he defines himselfbecause when she was born her father was 20 and her mother was 17. The father abandoned the young mother and Claise grew up with her and her grandparents, professional bakers who brought him up the old-fashioned way, with a heavy hand.

raised in a home no tv and no bathroom, which they shared with other families. He was from childhood to avid reader who at 14 was already taking his first steps in writing. But life wasn’t easy. At the age of 12 he works at dawn in the family bakery before going to school.

Claise venerates her maternal grandmother, a very young woman helped the resistance against the Nazi occupier during World War II, who hid Allied paratroopers and who became famous for beating up a Gestapo agent during a checkpoint.

A tough guy

The 66-year-old French-speaking native of Brussels, during his career he was responsible for corruption dossiers that put him before the powerful without ever batting an eye.

His critics say his methods they are not always the most orthodox and that he’s trigger happy. They feel that it uses processing as a tool for “make sing” to suspects without all evidence being constrained.

is anti-corruption expert finance and money laundering. In an interview with ‘France Info’ he told them that money laundering in the European economy exceeds one trillion euros a year and that “Europe is extremely weak” to fight this corruption.

The “terror” of bankers

The political magazine ‘Le Vif’ wrote in 2014 that Claise is “the judge who makes bankers tremble”. Then he was charged with the investigation of the dossier by tax fraud and money laundering which resulted in a multi-million dollar conviction against banking giant HSBC.

The bank had to pay €300 million to the Belgian state in 2019, the largest fine never withdrawn from Belgium. The AFP news agency reported this last week Claise even “likes” to go and annoy the powerful: “He has broad shoulders and fears no one.”

“I do my job”

Claise defended himself in 2020 in statements to the newspaper ‘Le Soir’, shortly after the HSBC case: “I am not a sheriff, I simply do my job within the law. I’m entrusted with dossiers involving influential personalities they are thought to be they are untouchable And I just do my job nothing more”.

Claise was a lawyer until he switched seats in court and became a judge 25 years ago. is a judge open to the mediawho gives interviews, who defines himself as a “humanist” and who has published a long list of novels: “Copper”, “The War Years”, “The Peace Years”, “The Golden Years”, “Memoirs of the Rif” and “Crime of the Initiates”.

This latest work of fiction tells how the Italian mafias and Chinese share the entrance of narcotics through the Belgian port of Antwerp, as they arrange in a Roman Trastevere restaurant and as Italian agents transmit information to the Belgian Office for the Suppression of Corruption. The same unit that led in the raids last weekend.

Claise is also a columnist for the newspaper “La Libre Belgique” and a professor at the Free University of Brussels.

Their books they have always been commercially successful and good reviews. If he has sometimes been treated as an “anarchist”, he considers himself a man of order and admits that he has been a Freemason since the 1980s “for inner reflection and for the personal enrichment of meeting others” which he gives attendance at the lodge.

A man in no uncertain terms, in a recent interview, complaining about the lack of technical and personal means to fight corruption, stated that the Government taking too much Xanax (an anxiolytic) e little Viagra.

Brussels, special

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