Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindler steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we have one of our Spotlight Series with a spotlight on Italy.

I'm in Rome with Andrea Logallio, a partner with Trace's long-standing partner law firm in Italy,

Studio Legale Biamonte. Thank you so much for joining me, Andrea. It's a pleasure to have some time

to talk to you. We are going country by country to look at recent trends, how things are

changing, whether they're improving, and in this case, what makes Italy a little bit different from some of your neighboring countries.

So why don't you just start with a broad overview of the corruption climate in Italy? How are things going?

Well, the first thing I may say, people starting speaking about the climate, that Italy has always

played an important role in the corruption arena, also dealing with the FCPA because of

the Lockett case, which was one of the reason now, which led to the adoption of the S.C.A.

Right. Takes us back 40 years now. Yeah, exactly. It took place partly in Italy, involving the highest government level.

On the other hand, we also mentioned another very more recent case, the Siemens case, no?

The origin of the case, I mean, it all started in Italy with Enel, so one of the electricity,

public electricity company. So I mean, we have an important

player in this arena. Actually, why do you spend a minute just talking about the origins of the

Siemens case? Because I don't think most people know that. It's turned out to be until very

recently the record-holding anti-bribery case worldwide, and it started in Italy.

The case was dealing with NL power, which was an important subsidiary of the Enel group,

and was related to an important bribe, I think it was more millions of dollars of euro,

two managers of this company being bribed.

That was the Public Prosecutor prosecutor's office of Milano that

started an investigation. And starting from this piece of investigation, I mean, it opened the door

...