Lawyer Inez Weski was arrested on Friday. She is allegedly suspected of passing on messages for her client Ridouan Taghi. He is suspected of ordering liquidations.
This confirms a high source within the Public Prosecution Service. The official response of the OM is that the arrest is not confirmed or denied. The law firm says it knows nothing.
The imminent arrest of Weski has been discussed in judicial circles for more than six months.
Encrypted messaging
The suspicion against Weski is said to be based on messages that have been made legible since the arrest of her client Ridouan Taghi in Dubai in 2019 via Sky Ecc, a popular service provider in the criminal environment, because encrypted messages could not be read by the police. In those messages, from the end of 2019, the son of Ridouan Taghi talks about “the lawyer” and “them”. He sent them to an aunt, one of Taghi’s sisters. The lawyer should take information for Taghi to prison and later Taghi’s response to it.
Although Weski’s name is not mentioned and Taghi has several lawyers, the police already conclude that the conversations of Taghi’s relatives are “presumably” about Weski. That conclusion is based on the context of these messages, the dates they were sent and the times Weski visited her client Taghi in prison. These findings were recorded by the police in a July 2021 police report and were repeated in an official report signed in July 2022.
Cousin with iPad
The messages in question are part of the investigation into Taghi’s cousin Youssef, who was arrested last October on suspicion of membership of a criminal organization. He has admitted that he smuggled messages for and from Taghi in and out of prison using an iPad. Those messages discuss, among other things, scenarios for an escape attempt by Taghi.
Weski was initially not regarded as a suspect in that investigation. This was partly due to the fact that only the messages from Ridouan Taghi’s son had become legible. The answers to this from, among others, his aunt were not legible at first. That made the content of those messages difficult to interpret.
More messages have now been made readable that have been sent via Sky’s service. This includes messages from a sister of Taghi, who communicated a lot with her brother’s son and also seems to have a lot of contact with Weski. Presumably, on the basis of those new messages, the content of which is unknown, the Public Prosecution Service has decided to designate Weski as a suspect and to arrest her.
Self-taught
Inez Weski (Rotterdam, 1955) is a leading criminal lawyer who has been practicing her profession for over forty years. In an interview in NRC in 2008, she said that after her studies she joined her sister who had already founded a law firm. She describes herself in that piece as “an autodidact”, who works very hard and is suspicious of the way the Public Prosecution Service works: “I do a lot of research myself outside the file.”
She is in charge of the contact with her customers, says Weski: “I am dominant in that, yes. Although there are also things in which you are more involved together. But if I don’t want something, I don’t do it. Do what you want, I say. But not with me.” She tells her clients to always tell the truth “whether it’s good or bad. He has to make the choice. Afterwards you should both know that this is the best we could achieve.”
From the content of the message traffic sent via Sky by Taghi’s son, it can be deduced that she is less able to say no in Taghi’s case. These are messages sent to his aunt. His father’s sister Ridouan seems to be Weski’s main contact.
The police deduce from the messages that the son and sister want to get in touch with Taghi through Weski. But the lawyer is not very willing at first, according to documents that NRC has seen. “That lawyer is just crazy,” reports Taghi’s son. “Never email or text. And if you e-mail her, she plays dumb.”
Only in the summer of 2021 does Weski seem willing to agree to the Taghi family’s request. There is then talk of a secured USB stick that Weski has to bring into prison. The police concludes that the stick contains messages to Ridouan Taghi from an accomplice: the Italian mafia boss Raffaele Imperiale. Taghi’s son also has very regular contact with him via Sky’s messaging service. In the end, the police suspect that Weski printed out the files on the USB stick and gave them to Ridouan Taghi sometime in August. After that, according to the police, Weski would have taken a written response from Taghi back sometime in early September. The whole process proves very time consuming and leads to irritation. “Yes, really not normal,” said Taghi’s son to his aunt. “Has been going on for a month… how slow this is all going.”
Finally, on November 18, 2020, Taghi’s son sends a message in English to Imperiale, his father’s Italian business partner. “I have just received a message from my v. He has a message for you too. I will send it like this, they are from 4 or 5 weeks ago.”