ROME – A solemn promise by Antonio Capuano, the lawyer of the Kuwaiti Embassy in Italy, to arrange payment of the longstanding debt to Italian Insider run up for work commissioned by the previous ambassador Sheikh Ali Khalid Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, has unfortunately come to nothing.

 At a meeting with the Italian Insider chief editor John Phillips in December 2018, Avv. Capuano, a former Forza Italia MP and respected professor of international law at Tor Vergata University, pledged that the Embassy would pay a longstanding debt to Insider Press Srl, parent company of Italian Insider, by arranging for Kuwaiti companies in Italy such as KPC and Q8 to advertise with the newspaper.

 The meeting followed mediation by the Italian foreign ministry in the dispute and Italian media coverage https://www.glistatigenerali.com/liberi-professionisti_parlamento/i-furbetti-delle-ambasciate-salvati-da-un-peones-del-pd/

of the evident refusal by the then Ambassador, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and now ambassador of Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, to honour payment of 10,000 euros for work commissioned for a special report on Italy-Kuwait relations in a series of articles that were published by the Insider in good faith, plus legal costs incurred subsequently.

 After a meeting on the subject between Avv. Capuano, the Kuwaiti chargé d’affaires, Italian Foreign Ministry officials and Mr Phillips held at the Italian foreign ministry in August 2018, the debt was not paid despite the Kuwaiti chargé d’affaires Sami Al-Zamanan telling Phillips and the Insider’s lawyer that “10,000 euros is nothing for Kuwait but you will have to give me 50 percent.” https://www.italianinsider.it/?q=node/8166

 Italian Insider is sure that the highly-respected new Kuwaiti ambassador to Italy, H.E. Sheikh Azzam Mubarak Sabah Al-Sabah, has not been fully informed of the failure to make the payment and will want to resolve it by arranging for the debt to be paid immediately in keeping with the pledge by Avv. Capuano.