Poised to take control of ‘the backbone of the UK’s energy production’, Franceso Mazzagatti is defending allegations of bribery, forgery and fraud

Francesco Mazzagatti is on the brink of becoming one of Britain’s most powerful industrialists.

In five years the 39-year-old Italian has built an oil and gas group with annual sales of £400 million. His company, Viaro, now awaits a rubber stamp from UK authorities to buy 11 North Sea gasfields from Shell—a half-billion-dollar deal that includes the Bacton terminal that supplies about a fifth of Britain’s gas. 

As he prepares to take control of what he has called “the backbone of the UK’s energy production and security”, a SourceMaterial investigation has pieced together a career dogged by accusations of fraud and difficulties in distancing himself from the Italian mafia.

Mazzagatti has not been convicted of any offence and denies any connection with organised crime. 

But the North Sea Transition Authority, the regulator that must approve the deal, says it considers even unresolved cases when determining a buyer’s fitness—and campaigners have asked whether the NSTA adequately vetted Mazzagatti.  

“It is deeply alarming that the UK authorities could allow a company with so many serious warning signs to buy up such significant stakes in North Sea oil production,” said Susan Hawley, head of the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption. “There are real questions for the regulators about whether they did the proper checks.”

SourceMaterial’s findings reveal that Mazzagatti and companies he leads have been accused of fraud on multiple occasions, including in a previously unreported ongoing prosecution in Italy. 

He denies wrongdoing in all the cases. 

SourceMaterial’s investigation, shared with Bloomberg News, also found that concerns over Mazzagatti’s possible past contact with figures linked to Italian organised crime contributed to Eni, the Italian oil giant, breaking off relations with his company shortly before UK regulators approved his first North Sea acquisition in 2020. 

Mazzagatti has further been accused of using faked documents to help seal that transaction. The cash for the £250 million deal, according to a claim lodged by former business partners at the High Court in London, was embezzled from an Iranian petrochemicals group. 

His lawyers, Carter-Ruck, said that the embezzlement claim is part of a vexatious, multi-jurisdictional smear campaign and without merit. 

Mazzagatti, who also faces criminal litigation in Italy, “has found himself exposed to misinterpretation by Western authorities of transactions conducted across jurisdictions with differing commercial practices,” they said, adding that normal practice in the oil industry could be misconstrued as opaque if viewed “without the necessary context”.

The NSTA declined to comment. 

The controversies surrounding Mazzagatti and Viaro show that Britain needs more stringent checks before handing over strategic assets, said Maximilian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“We have an ownership test for not only clubs in the Premier League but the lower leagues of English football,” he said. “It is frankly ridiculous to say that we should not hold investors in our key, flagship energy assets to the same or higher standards.”

A small town in Calabria

Mazzagatti is today one of Britain’s best-paid executives, earning £28 million last year, while his empire includes a £16 million central London headquarters. 

Testifying to the High Court last year in the embezzlement case brought by his former partners, Mazzagatti appeared placid. Tall and shaven-headed, he spoke so quietly that the judge and stenographer asked him repeatedly to speak up. 

The quiet demeanour belies a singular ambition.

His fortune has its origins in a run-down former olive oil depot in Gioia Tauro, a coastal town not far from his home village of Polistena in Calabria, Italy’s poorest region. 

For his 18th birthday, Mazzagatti, the son of a lorry driver, requested an unusual gift: he asked his parents to incorporate a company for him. Records show that a few days later Pascal SAS was founded, named after Mazzagatti’s older brother, who had died eight years before.

In 2007 the fledgling business made its first payment on the Gioia Tauro warehouse. Mazzagatti’s plan was to attract government support to replicate the modern distribution hubs he had seen in Italy’s more prosperous north. 

Soon government funds started flowing and the depot became the fulcrum of a modest fruit and juice logistics business. It was the first rung of what would become a spectacular ascent.

But Gioia Tauro was not an easy place to do business. In 2008, Italian authorities had identified the Tyrrhenian Sea port as a stronghold of Calabria’s infamous mafia, the ’Ndrangheta. Anyone trading there was likely to rub up against them—and Mazzagatti was no exception.

Mafia feud

Corporate documents show that Mazzagatti bought his depot from a company controlled by the family of Teodoro Mazzaferro. The notorious mafioso had a decades-old reputation for running the business affairs of the Piromalli clan—long dominant in the Gioia Tauro area and considered among the most powerful factions in the ’Ndrangheta. 

Mazzagatti would later lease a second property from another Mazzaferro enterprise—a townhouse for his family, his lawyers said. 

In June 2020 anti-mafia investigators seized control of both companies—the one that sold the depot and the one that leased the townhouse—in a crackdown on the Piromallis that would see Mazzaferro jailed. 

Mazzagatti’s lawyers said that “to the best of Mr Mazzagatti’s recollection, Teodoro Mazzaferro owned the majority of the commercial property market in Gioia Tauro” and that the warehouse was “the most suited to his needs” from the “limited options available”. 

Of the family townhouse, they added: “Even after Mr Mazzaferro’s assets were seized, Mr Mazzagatti has confirmed that he continued to rent his property and paid the court-appointed administrator.”

As the juice business got up and running, Mazzagatti hired his first and for a while only employee: David Cambrea, a local man 15 years older than him. In 2008, just a year after he began overseeing renovations at the warehouse, Cambrea was murdered in a mafia feud. Later that year an Italian parliamentary report named him as an affiliate of an ’Ndrangheta gang. 

Responding to questions through his lawyers, Mazzagatti said that it was impossible to do business or live in Calabria without interacting with members of the ’Ndrangheta or people suspected of involvement in organised crime.

Cambrea “was not hired in his capacity as an alleged ‘mafioso’, which would be entirely at odds with him having been hired by Pascal under a standard employment law contract”, Mazzagatti’s lawyers said. 

They emphasised that Mazzagatti had not, to his knowledge, ever been the subject of an anti-mafia investigation or questioned by any law enforcement agency about any such suspicions.

Operation Easy

Mazzagatti would soon find himself entangled in a gang-related plot. 

In 2009 Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, launched Operation Easy, a concerted attempt to track a gang of fraudsters with links to the Piromallis.

The group had used forged bank documents and shell companies to obtain €3 million of goods, from electrical appliances to flour. 

“It was organised amazingly well,” recalled Giuseppe Creazzo, the chief prosecutor on the case. “The supplier would send all of the goods, which would then disappear.”

— CLICK HERE FOR A SUMMARY OF MAZZAGATTI’S LEGAL BATTLES —

The API embezzlement case: Mazzagatti is accused by former business partners in London’s High Court of embezzling €143m from Alliance Petrochemicals Investment, a Singapore entity that owned an Iranian petrochemicals company. He says the case is part of a vexatious, multi-jurisdictional smear campaign and that he has secured victories in related cases in Sharjah and Singapore.

The Taqa asset-stripping case: Mazzagatti was accused by two of Viaro‘s former partners in a North Sea oil field of “asset-stripping” a Viaro subsidiary and selling it for a dollar, leaving it unable to pay its share of decommissioning. Mazzagatti won the case last year, with the judge saying he behaved in good faith. Taqa is appealing.

The Milan criminal trial: Mazzagatti is among 15 defendants in a sprawling case focusing on alleged wrongdoing at Eni, the Italian oil giant. He is charged with bribery and money-laundering over Iran-linked trades. Fraud charges were dropped in late 2023. Mazzagatti denies wrongdoing and the case continues.

The Rome tax trial: Mazzagatti is accused by the Italian tax authority of fraud and accounting irregularities. He says that he has not been formally notified of any case but concedes there is a “pending administrative dispute”, in which he denies wrongdoing.

Some of the loot ended up on Mazzagatti’s premises, police alleged. In 2011 he was subject to a precautionary arrest order for alleged fraud, according to Creazzo and a Guardia di Finanza report. Several of the ringleaders were jailed. 

Mazzagatti was acquitted in 2013. He told SourceMaterial that he was never under any form of arrest and that the judge dismissed the charges against him “in their entirety”. 

His lawyers also pointed out that the investigation was carried out by the financial police rather than Italy’s anti-mafia agencies.

Pizzeria pivot

Mazzagatti’s fruit juice logistics business initially struggled to turn a profit, official records suggest. But a chance meeting with a young Bahraini woman in a Rome pizzeria would transform his fortunes—and redirect his ambitions to the Middle East.  

Nadia Al Matrook, the US university-educated daughter of a wealthy Bahraini businessman, first met Mazzagatti when the pair were in their early 20s. They became a couple and by 2012 Mazzagatti had established a new trading company called Napag Italia, short for Nadia Pascal Group. 

Originally Mazzagatti planned to expand the fruit and juice trade abroad. But in 2014 Napag turned its attention to a bigger market: oil and gas.

Through Nadia’s brother, Mazzagatti met Arshiya Jahanpour, the 21-year-old son of an Iranian petrochemicals and plastics tycoon whose family has properties in Dubai, London and Florida. 

“Almost as brothers”

Soon Mazzagatti and Jahanpour’s families were inseparable, holidaying together and staying in each other’s homes. At one point Mazzagatti lent his friend thousands of dollars to buy a dog, a teacup Pomeranian. The pair were “almost as brothers”, he later told the High Court in London. 

At around the same time, a Calabrian colleague put Mazzagatti in touch with Piero Amara, a well-connected Sicilian lawyer who had worked for Eni, Italy’s state-controlled oil giant. 

With Jahanpour’s Iran contacts and Amara’s Italian connections, Mazzagatti was able to position himself as an intermediary between Italy and Iran, unlocking deals worth millions. 

By the time Mazzagatti married Nadia in 2016, Napag had offices in Dubai and London, as well as Rome, where it shared an address with Amara’s consultancy.   

Ferrari club

In a few years Napag’s sales leapt from zero to €160 million. Mazzagatti cultivated tastes to match his new status: bank statements cited in court show membership fees for the Dubai Ferrari Owners’ Club and outlays at Cartier and Bulgari. 

But as business boomed, an event in 2018 would set in motion a chain of events that today threatens to upend Mazzagatti’s burgeoning empire and his personal life. 

That February his Italian partner, Amara, was arrested. He would later be jailed for misleading authorities in a corruption investigation into Eni.  

Prosecutors investigating Amara followed a trail of evidence that led them to pursue a detailed examination of Mazzagatti. A search of Amara’s office revealed how intertwined the two men’s business dealings had become.  

As part of their investigation, the Guardia di Finanza in February 2019 filed a report with the Milan public prosecutor detailing Mazzagatti’s previous brushes with the law, going all the way back to Calabria and Operation Easy.

It would later be lodged as evidence in a sprawling criminal trial against Mazzagatti, Amara and others in Milan.

Alongside Operation Easy, the report cited five occasions between 2007 and 2012 when police allegedly spotted Mazzagatti with people they described as having police records or presumed to be part of a “significant crime family”.

Three, including the son of a boss of the infamous Piromalli gang, were suspected of ’Ndrangheta involvement. 

A fourth was not noted as a mafia suspect but has since been sentenced to 14 years in prison, pending appeal, in a major mafia trial. The fifth was also not recorded as a mafia suspect but had separately been named in press coverage as linked to the ’Ndrangheta when he was jailed for attempted murder in 2014.

In a telephone call with SourceMaterial, one of the mafia suspects confirmed knowing Mazzagatti and, speaking in Italian to a third party audible on the line, referred to him as “a friend overseas”.

Mazzagatti’s lawyers said that the May 2012 meeting observed by police with the son of a Piromalli boss was “completely without significance” because the man was “a well-known law-abiding figure in the local community” with “no suspicion attached to him”.

More broadly, they stated that Mazzagatti has “no recollection of the occasions of these supposed police sightings”. 

“It is impossible to live in Calabria and avoid all contact with anyone who is currently or has in the past been suspected, under investigation for, or charged with mafia-type crime,” the lawyers said.  “For historical and cultural reasons, the offending individuals are fully integrated into the community, not ostracised, and associating with such individuals is perfectly normal.”

Innocent civilians are often unwittingly subject to police surveillance as a result, they added. Mazzagatti has pointed out that he has not been convicted of any crime and contests certain factual information in the Guardia di Finanza’s file. 

All the same, two weeks after the financial police filed the report to the Milan prosecutor, the axe dropped. Eni blacklisted Mazzagatti’s Napag—ending his supplier status and threatening to sever the Italy-Iran connection that was rapidly making him rich. 

White Moon

Three months after Mazzagatti’s Napag was struck from Eni’s supplier list, a 274-metre oil tanker anchored off the coast of Sicily bearing a cargo of Iraqi crude for Eni’s Milazzo refinery. 

White Moon’s voyage had been marked by a series of ship-to-ship transfers. These manoeuvres, where tankers exchange cargoes at sea rather than in port, can be used by traders to disguise the origins of their products. 

Eni says that when it tested the oil, it found chemical traces suggesting that the cargo wasn’t from Iraq at all. Instead, Eni says, it bore the signature of oil from US-sanctioned Iran—an impression reinforced by analysis of satellite data suggesting that the oil started its journey at Iran’s Kharg Island terminal. 

Alarm bells were soon ringing. Multinational oil companies rely routinely on US institutions and financing, and take Washington’s sanctions seriously. 

Eni’s investigation found that although it had bought the oil through a Nigerian intermediary, Mazzagatti’s Napag was ultimately behind the trade—even though it had been blacklisted as a supplier. 

A former Napag employee testified in Milan earlier this year that Mazzagatti had discussed the deal at her home in Tehran shortly before White Moon set sail. Napag sourced the oil from a Turkish company called Empirist Enerji, which gave assurances that the crude was indeed Iraqi, she said. 

Turkish corporate records show that Empirist was established the year before the White Moon trade by a Calabrian businessman named in Italian and UK court proceedings as an associate of Mazzagatti. 

Neither Napag nor Mazzagatti have been convicted of any wrongdoing in relation to the White Moon cargo. Fraud charges relating to the trade were dropped in 2023, though Mazzagatti remains on trial accused of bribing a senior Eni trader to conclude the White Moon deal and an earlier Iranian petrochemicals trade.

Mazzagatti’s lawyers said it “had never been proven that the White Moon cargo was of Iranian origin”. He “has always vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and maintains that Napag complied with all relevant applicable rules,” they said. 

They declined to answer questions on the role and ultimate ownership of Empirist Enerji, accusing SourceMaterial of “repeated fishing expeditions” for information. Mazzagatti denies that the Calabrian businessman who established Empirist was his associate, and that he was acting on his behalf.

Lawyers for Mazzagatti said that his company and Eni settled their dispute earlier this year. Eni did not return requests for comment but has previously accused Napag of defrauding the company.

‘Evasion hub’

Even as the White Moon dispute was closing doors to Mazzagatti with Eni, others were opening. 

In 2018, through holding companies in Hong Kong and Singapore, he had acquired a controlling 60 per cent stake in the Mehr Petrochemicals company, an Iranian producer of raw ingredients for plastics. The family of his friend Jahanpour would also later join as co-investors. 

The remainder of the company was held ultimately by Iran’s National Petroleum Company—meaning that Mazzagatti was now in business with the Tehran regime.

It was lucrative work. Mazzagatti would later tell investors that the Hong Kong company holding his interest in Mehr made $18 million in profit in 2019, while a UAE arm of his trading network recorded similar earnings. 

But like the relationship with Eni, the Mehr investment would soon bring trouble. 

“A vast network of front companies”

First Mazzagatti’s relationship with Jahanpour imploded. In London’s High Court, his former best friend’s family and other investors would accuse him of embezzling €140 million from Alliance Petrochemical Investments, a Singaporean company that was part of the refinery’s ownership structure.

In the separate criminal case in Milan, the prosecutor would later allege that Mazzagatti laundered the cash used to buy his Mehr stake using trades with Eni that he secured through bribes.

In 2023 US authorities identified Mehr as a player in a “vast network of front companies” used to evade sanctions on Iran. Several days later Mazzagatti transferred his stake in the refinery to a friend in Dubai. 

[Read SourceMaterial’s previous investigation on the Mehr refinery here]

Mazzagatti’s lawyers say that he did not breach sanctions and that he had “intended to divest himself of the shareholding” before sanctions took effect.

The High Court embezzlement litigation was a part of a vexatious campaign to vilify him, they said. He is countersuing his former business partners and directors, including Jahanpour and his own former lawyer.

In the Milan laundering and bribery case, which continues, Mazzagatti maintains his innocence. His lawyers also said that he had defeated a case brought in Singapore “in relation to similar underlying allegations”, and that a criminal prosecution against him in the Emirate of Sharjah was dropped.  

Two sheikhs

With Milan prosecutors digging into White Moon, life at home in Italy became less comfortable for Mazzagatti.

In 2020 he started a new company in London, Viaro. He moved to the UK for “reputational reasons”, he would later say. Under a fresh brand, Viaro would carry on where Napag left off.   

By that summer he had pulled off a coup: the £250 million acquisition of RockRose Energy, an oil gas company quoted on the London Stock Exchange. 

The purchase catapulted Mazzagatti into the big league, transforming him from a relatively minor trader into an owner of oil and gas fields in the North Sea. Yet it wasn’t long before his British venture also met controversy. 

Just months after the acquisition, Viaro was hit with a £110 million clean-up charge for defunct North Sea wells. 

Mazzagatti’s partners expected Viaro to foot its share of the costs. Instead they woke one morning in December 2020 to find that he had sold the arm of RockRose responsible for the clean-up funds for a dollar. 

The buyer, a company owned by the Emirate of Fujairah, promptly defaulted on the payment, leaving Mazzagatti’s co-investors with the bill. 

Two of them, Taqa Bratani and Spirit Energy, sued Viaro and Mazzagatti, accusing him of “asset-stripping” RockRose and leaving it unable to meet its commitments. 

Mazzagatti and Viaro won the asset-stripping case. Mazzagatti was “nothing if not an astute businessman” acting in good faith and it was not his fault if the buyer did not carry out due diligence, the judge said. 

But rather than repair his reputation, the case churned up fresh discord. 

Proof of funds

When Viaro first bid for RockRose, its advisers worried about whether Mazzagatti could “get the dosh together”, according to a source close to the sellers. 

Mazzagatti answered their concerns with assurances that Viaro had secured backing from two members of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, who stood ready to lend £250 million apiece. 

To prove funds were available, Viaro sent its corporate advisers a “confirmation of balances” from the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. It showed that one of the prospective lenders, Sheikh Zayed bin Suroor bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, had an account there holding 1.3 billion dirham (about $350 million). 

Viaro’s former partners allege that the document is a forgery. SourceMaterial understands that Zayed does not recognise the account number of the account said to be in his name. 

In January the sheikh issued a statement saying the loan facility claimed by Mazzagatti was a fiction, and that no arrangement between the two had existed.

Mazzagatti had told the High Court that he negotiated with Zayed’s chief of staff, Omar Al Ketbi. Contacted by SourceMaterial, Al Ketbi said that he never held such a role, or had authority to act for Zayed. 

Lawyers for Mazzagatti said that it remains his “pleaded case that the Facility Agreements were genuine, binding and available”. He “did not suspect that the ADCB statement was anything other than genuine and he continues to believe it to be genuine,” they said. 

Taqa is now appealing the case.

Cuttlefish shame

Meanwhile, Mazzagatti also faces fraud accusations in a criminal trial in Rome, according to an indictment seen by SourceMaterial. 

He and former directors of Napag are accused by Italy’s finance ministry of using €107 million in “fictitious revenues” to mislead lenders, and of using “fictitious liabilities” to reduce the company’s tax bill. 

Through his lawyers, Mazzagatti told SourceMaterial that he had not been formally notified of the criminal case, though he acknowledged a “pending administrative dispute”. He and Napag believe that “the transactions were genuine, properly documented, and consistent with standard international trading practice”, the lawyers said.

It is not the first time Mazzagatti has been accused of relying on forged documents. 

In 2019, during an unsuccessful libel suit against Italian publications who had written about White Moon, he sought to show that their articles had caused him financial damage. 

“Not very good forgeries”

He presented the court with invoices for £418,000 from a public relations firm apparently based in Mauritius, from where, he said, it had advised his companies on protecting their reputation. 

Lawyers for the Italian publications told the court that the bills were “not very good forgeries” and that Napag’s clouding of the matter would “put a cuttlefish to shame”. 

Mazzagatti’s legal team conceded at trial the invoices could not be relied upon. They did, however, demand that the accusation of forgery be withdrawn. 

“I must say that they have no reason to withdraw it,” Justice Jay said in his judgment, adding that the doubtful evidence “left something of an afterglow”. 

In a statement to SourceMaterial, Mazzagatti’s representatives said: 

“The invoices were provided by a PR firm who were retained by Napag to mitigate the harm caused by the articles which were the subject of our claim. We are not in a position to comment on the formalities of the invoices, as we did not render them, but we absolutely maintain that the costs were properly incurred and formed a legitimate part of our claim, and any statement otherwise is both false and highly defamatory.”

Romanian network

Mazzagatti has cited the pervasiveness of organised crime in his home country among the factors that drove him to seek his fortune overseas. 

It has turned out not to be so simple. 

In the London embezzlement case, he is accused of using companies owned by two associates from Calabria to siphon €140 million from the owner of Mehr Petrochemicals. 

Those two businessmen, SourceMaterial has found, have been partners of convicted criminals, a mafioso and several mafia-linked businessmen in a network of Calabrian-owned companies in Deva, a small city in the Transylvania region of Romania.

Among the criminals who were in business with Mazzagatti’s associates was Antonino Cuzzocrea, who is serving a 30-year sentence for shooting dead his cousin and was linked to the mafia in a 2012 government report. 

Statements for one of Mazzagatti’s bank accounts, lodged in court as part of the embezzlement case, show that Mazzagatti paid Cuzzocrea about €180,000 in a two-year period to 2022. 

The payments predate Cuzzocrea’s conviction. Mazzagatti’s lawyers said they related to building work on a family home. 

In his defence to the embezzlement claim, Mazzagatti denied a close connection to the Calabrian businessmen and accused them of siphoning money to entities controlled by his former friend, Jahanpour. 

He rejects any insinuation of “shared culpability or coordinated misconduct” with the businessmen, his lawyers said. 

Royal forest

Down a private road adjoining woodland owned by King Charles III stands a whitewashed mansion boasting two swimming pools, a cinema and a separate boarding house for staff.

Acquired last year for £25 million, it is the latest eye-catching addition to Mazzagatti’s empire. 

It stands nearly 2,000 kilometres away from the Gioia Tauro warehouse where it all started. That too is still in the family: ownership of Pascal was last year transferred to Mazzagatti’s 25-year-old sister. 

Mindful to restrict his time in the UK to avoid triggering a hefty tax bill, Mazzagatti has in recent years often stayed in Paris, where he and his sister own a handsome belle époque property in the prestigious 16th arrondissement. 

In the last three years he has paid himself £63 million—about four times the average for bosses of FTSE 100 companies.

“Gambling is not the way to manage risk, it is the way to be destroyed by risk”

Two decades ago, as Mazzagatti took his first steps in commerce, it was his father’s one-lorry logistics business that taught him that a stable, profitable venture could be undone by risk. 

“I looked at his business and I realised that he could do much better with more than one truck,” he wrote in 2019. “Gambling is not the way to manage risk, it is the way to be destroyed by risk.”

Instead of stability, he now faces two civil lawsuits in London, with satellite cases in Singapore and the UAE, claiming hundreds of millions of dollars from him and his companies, as well as criminal charges in Milan and Rome. 

Some critics ask how Mazzagatti was able to venture so deeply into sensitive areas of British industry without questions being raised. 

“North Sea oil fields are clearly a strategic asset for the UK,” said Phil Brickell MP,  chair of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption. “This deal must be subject to proper scrutiny by the relevant authorities.”

Viaro and Shell have said they expect approval for the transaction before the end of the year. The sale of critical energy infrastructure should be subject to the “utmost due diligence”, said Ben Cowdock, head of investigations at Transparency International UK. 

“Essential public services to millions of people cannot be put at risk.”

Headline picture: Nick Smyth/Alamy