Late last year, Florentine prosecutors finally identified a fugitive by the bloated corpse washed up months before on a beach near Dubai, naked and with most of its skin missing.
But an official DNA match to Samuele Landi, formerly the boss of one of Italy’s top telecom companies, only deepened the mystery of his life.
Landi was a telecoms entrepreneur turned fraudster and fugitive who burned a trail from Italy to west Africa to the Middle East over the course of a decade.
The story of his life is colourful and complicated — from a small-time dealmaker with an apparent sideline in phone sex chatrooms, to diplomat and alleged acquaintance of sheikhs and presidents. Even as he managed to avoid being brought to justice by international authorities, he worked on a plan to sell carbon credits to Emirati royalty.
But after Landi’s last attempt at a redemption trade went south, he decided to pursue his fortunes on the high seas. He planned to live the rest of his days in international waters, with a quixotic dream of mining bitcoin by solar power on a flotilla held together with giant rubber bands.
His apparent death at sea helps shine a light on the grey areas in international law and trade where it is possible for unorthodox characters to pursue lucrative opportunities and ideals of personal freedom, with little regard for national laws.
On the seafront of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, is a crumbling villa, built on sand and now sinking fast, the sea seeping further into its cracked concrete foundations with every turn of the tide. It was built by Landi around the time of the global financial crisis.
I visited hoping it might hold clues as to how this maverick executive had come to secure his status as one of West Africa’s top diplomats in the Middle East.
But “now is no good”, said a skinny man in lime-coloured trousers, who appeared at the villa holding a pair of keys. Two more men emerged from behind the house, one carrying a sizeable kitchen knife and a truncheon. They wanted to know why I was trying to “break in” to a dead man’s flooded house at dusk.
The guards had been watching the property since Landi’s disappearance. Once put at ease, they wanted to understand who he was, and what he did for Liberia. They led the way inside, through garish yellow and turquoise rooms. Salt water splashed through a gaping hole in the front room at high tide. Everywhere the ceiling was starting to fall in. Painted lobster shells, grapes and slices of lemon danced on the terracotta tiles in the kitchen.
In the late 2000s, Landi’s businesses had been doing a roaring trade. Born into a wealthy family in Arezzo, a hilltop town in Tuscany, he had made his early fortunes with Plugit, which sold dial-up internet with a side-hustle in erotic chat rooms. In his spare time, he competed in off-road car races across Africa.
In 2004 the company changed its name to Eutelia following the acquisition of a rival, with Landi serving variously as chief executive and director.
In Italy, Eutelia laid fibre-optic cables and became one its largest telecoms operators. But its heyday was shortlived. By 2008, Italian authorities were investigating Eutelia’s accounting practices.
Prosecutors would later say that Landi helped orchestrate the sale of Eutelia’s failing IT business to a subsidiary, Agile, in June 2009, after piling it with debt. He was also alleged to have helped falsify invoices and costs worth €2.4mn in the preceding years, contributing to Eutelia’s later demise.
In Eutelia’s annual accounts from the time and the accompanying court documents, one country is mentioned repeatedly. Prosecutors said millions were lost in a Liberian “accounting desert”, including for the purchase of a plane. Liberia is also where Eutelia allegedly ran part of an operation to inflate its telephone traffic, in exchange for fees that would have been worth more than €1mn from another operator.
Landi’s businesses used unorthodox means to get callers to stay on the line in his Liberian operations. At a call centre not far from the site of the Monrovian villa, hundreds of young women once worked the phones in three shift patterns.
The average salary was around $50 a week, but the longer they could keep the men phoning in, the more they got paid, according to Charles Konneh, who managed “Liberia Call Centre Inbound”. Landi was the ultimate boss of the operation, flying in with his family for a visit and staying at the five-star Cape hotel on the other side of town.
James Harding Giahyue, editor of The DayLight newspaper, sent a young female friend to work at the call centre, thinking he had found her a respectable job. “It was a sex business, but more of a telecoms business,” he said. “It was raw, the men could say anything.” (Konneh denied the conversations were sexual.)
Landi made his last reported public appearance in Italy in November 2009, when he had a confrontation with laid-off employees at his office buildings in Rome. It was also the start of a legal battle lasting well over a decade, resulting in a prison sentence for eight years that he never served.
By the summer of 2010, Eutelia and Agile were officially bankrupt. The Monrovia call centre shut down abruptly around the same time, Konneh says. He dumped its computers in the villa, from where he says they were stolen. By that time, Landi had fled to Dubai. He was declared a fugitive by the Italian court system — and kept a low profile for eight years.
But Landi’s involvement with Liberia did not end there.
The country’s economy bears the scars of 14 years of brutal civil war that had ended in 2003. Offshore oilfield exploration has yet to yield a commercial success and in 2018, when former international football star George Weah was elected president, the country still lacked reliable roads and a functional health system.
Weah needed to attract foreign investment. His best shot? The United Arab Emirates, which wanted to splash its oil winnings to gain influence in Africa. The UAE was the last place Weah had played professionally before retirement.
Weah also had close ties to Italy. The first and only African winner of Fifa’s World Player of the Year award, Weah had left a mark at AC Milan, where he played in the 1990s.
By 2018, Landi was building a digital security career in Dubai. Fingers in Italian, Emirati and Liberian business circles meant he was well placed to play the role of middleman in the African country’s plans to attract investment.
There was one problem. The UAE had begun taking steps to finalise an extradition treaty with Italy — while Landi was still a wanted man at home.
Landi managed to obtain a Liberian diplomatic passport, eventually with the title of consul general to Dubai, according to two Liberian diplomats. The appointment was with Weah’s backing, they said. Under Liberia’s constitution, all consul nominations must be approved by the president. This gave the fugitive businessman a degree of diplomatic immunity.
At first the relationship was mutually beneficial. Landi became a “lobbier for the country as a whole”, said a diplomat who worked with Landi. He was in charge of licensing the use of Liberia’s flag to ships based in the Middle East and parts of the Mediterranean, including Greece and Turkey.
Liberia is one of the world’s most popular flags of convenience, offering ship owners quick and cheap access to registration in a country that may offer more discretion than their own.
Landi was the “quiet” and “very humble” man who was always in town to make the life of presidential envoys in Dubai easier, said Trokon Kpui, a minister under Weah.
And he got results. The UAE agreed to pay for a $20mn solar-powered hospital, sports facilities and convoys of military trucks for Liberia. Landi negotiated this type of deal on behalf of Weah’s government, including the hospital, said George Nixon Kingsley, a friend of Landi’s in Liberia.
Kpui, however, said that this type of deal was “not really done through Landi,” but was instead negotiated thanks to Weah’s “personal relationship” with the UAE and with its leadership.
Commenting on Landi’s relationship to Weah, he said: “While it’s true Landi might have served in that [consul] position . . . he brought personally to George Weah nothing.”
A person who represents Weah did not provide a comment.
The passport seemed to keep Landi safe. Although Italy issued a request for arrest and extradition to Emirati authorities for Landi in April 2019, he was able to continue living in Dubai. The Italian foreign ministry told the FT it only “ascertained” that Landi held a Liberian passport more than two years later.
At the same time, Landi and his wife Laura Gallorini were also cultivating their own network locally. Landi started working as an adviser to a company owned by Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al-Maktoum, a Dubai royal and an energy investor with a special focus on West Africa.
In 2018, Landi had become the sole shareholder of Liberia Energy Green, a renewable energy distributor, incorporation documents show. The following year he appeared in a photo taken to confirm that the Abu Dhabi state-backed renewable energy company Masdar would grant $4mn to Liberia alongside the UAE government and a UN agency. Masdar said that Landi had attended in his capacity as consul general for Liberia.
Landi also worked for Dubai-based cyber security company Kryptotel, which said it produced the first “crypto phone” in the Middle East and Africa, offering foreign governments military-grade encryption.
He proclaimed his innocence to anyone who would listen, including in an appearance by video call on a tablet held by his lawyer Amedeo di Segni at a press conference called in Arezzo’s town square in September 2019.
“This guy had a lot of imagination,” without being “necessarily very intelligent”, says Jan de Smet, an independent Dutch investigator who researched Landi’s life as part of his work on deforestation and corruption.
“He had this charisma thing over him and of course the aura of the adventurer, the successful adventurer . . . which was attractive maybe.”
Landi’s Liberian passport had been his shield. But its guarantee began to look less certain, prompting his most dramatic move yet.
After a Liberian national was arrested and later convicted of money laundering and wire fraud in the US in April 2022, Liberian embassies received orders to review the allocation of diplomatic passports and to deny honorary positions to those under criminal investigation.
Liberian authorities threatened to confiscate Landi’s passport, the diplomat who worked with Landi said, leaving him vulnerable again to arrest and extradition.
Growing increasingly desperate, Landi moved in December 2022 on to a second-hand barge off the coast of Dubai in what he described as international waters. He started working from there, joking that people would have to swim to reach the consulate, whose office building he shut down.
Just a few weeks in, a storm struck, leaving Landi and his crew surviving off fish for nearly a month. They later laughed at the incident, calling the barge “Purring Island” after the cats who had survived with them.
Weah’s foreign minister Dee-Maxwell Saah Kemayah was less amused, and accused Landi of underperforming on the less glamorous sides of his diplomatic job. He was, for instance, unable to negotiate on behalf of Liberian workers who had overstayed their visas in Dubai, as he was too nervous to visit the police station in person.
His request to be promoted to ambassador was vetoed by the UAE because of concerns about his court cases in Italy and the fact he remained an Italian citizen, the two diplomats said.
Working to keep his options open on dry land, he attempted to tap other powerful contacts in Dubai.
In early 2023, Landi worked on a deal that would have given Emirati royal Maktoum’s company Blue Carbon exclusive rights to generate and sell carbon credits on about 1mn hectares of Liberian land. Blue Carbon would receive 70 per cent of the value of the credits, according to a draft proposal drawn up in July 2023.
Around the time the proposal was finalised, Landi received fresh reassurances about his passport, one diplomat who worked with Landi said.
Blue Carbon told the FT in a statement that it had not had any involvement in or influence over “the diplomatic status or the personal affairs of Mr. Landi”. His advice to the company had focused on block chain verification of environmental assets.
“Any of Mr. Landi’s connections in regard to Liberia, were independent to and not tied to any discussions of potential opportunities between Blue Carbon and the Liberian Government,” it said.
Landi’s time living on a barge apparently kindled an interest in seasteading, or making a life in international waters.
He had helped build a blockchain ledger for the self-proclaimed micronation of Liberland, a libertarian settlement based on a land-bank between Croatia and Serbia, and became friendly with its “president” the Czech politician Vít Jedlička.
In November 2023 Jedlička visited Landi’s floating embassy. The waters were choppy and two fishermen and a yacht salesman had refused to sail him there. In the end, he had hitched a ride on the speedboat that kept the barge supplied with fruit and vegetables.
As waves buffeted the tiny craft, Jedlička, with a blond beard cut into a neat goatee, bumped about on an uncomfortable bench, trying to find a spot where his baby-blue linen jacket could avoid being splashed. After about an hour, Landi hauled a damp Jedlička up the makeshift ladder on to the barge.
The 72m by 20m vessel was pocked with orange rust damage. But Landi felt he was well set up there. For much of the year he had been using a Starlink satellite connection to juggle his diplomatic roles in Dubai and Liberia. Landi had a desalination plant for water and solar panels for energy, he separately told Jedlička in an amateur video interview.
Landi’s long-term plan was to move a larger barge out through the Gulf of Oman and thousands of miles south through the Indian Ocean closer to the Saya de Malha, a sandbank where he would use giant rubber bands to tie a network of barges together, creating a floating city.
He set out these plans to Oswald Horowitz, a freelance documentary maker who spent time with Landi on his barge that year to make a feature about his life.
Jedlička, who hoped this would act as “a back-up territory in case of any trouble in Europe”, said Landi promised to fly the flag of Liberland. The flotilla would use solar energy to mine bitcoin tax-free and sell carbon credits.
The two men talked throughout the afternoon, high on what Jedlička called the “sex appeal” of creating their own systems of government at sea, far outside the reaches of the EU’s creeping bureaucracy and even of Dubai’s notoriously light-touch approach to taxes.
Meanwhile, two crew members worked underwater to weld shut holes in air tanks that the storm earlier in the year had caused. Jedlička said his goodbyes, knowing that Landi had stayed longer than planned on a boat that was increasingly leaky.
In late 2023, Weah’s government lost a tight general election and Landi’s access to a passport was threatened again.
Sara Beysolow Nyanti, Liberia’s new foreign minister, launched a crusade shortly after taking office to revoke improperly distributed diplomatic passports. Nyanti refused to allow even her own security staff to use diplomatic passports for fast track through airports, a diplomat and a former lawmaker said. People close to Nyanti did not provide a comment.
To make matters worse, the Blue Carbon deal did not move forward. The FT and other outlets reported at the end of 2023 that communities who believed the land belonged to them had not been properly consulted on the deal. Blue Carbon denied failing to consult with communities.
“Carbon credits have been cursed around here,” said Wilson Tarpeh, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time of the deal and flew out to meet Landi in Dubai to discuss it. “Anyone who has tried to do them round here gets beaten up.”
Tarpeh said he advised against the deal but was overruled by Weah’s top brass. When we met in Monrovia’s business district, Tarpeh jabbed at an oversized calculator on his desk to show me the many millions of tonnes of carbon wealth that could be protected in Liberia’s interior.
But Rudolph Merab, head of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority, told me that, as a result of the lack of interest from western buyers, “we have not seen one cent from the carbon we are absorbing from the forests”. He has been trying to find new buyers for the credits but says he has recently been offered only $1 a tonne, well below the market price.
Merab’s logging company at the time was named in former dictator Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial as an alleged conduit for cash to arm and direct Sierra Leone’s civil war. Merab denies that he or the company supported the war. He said: “I would never support a president fighting war. Nothing I did was hidden from anybody.”
In February 2024, soon after the collapse of the deal and the change of government, storms whipped the coast of Dubai.
Landi’s daughter Saahra told Horowitz, the documentary maker, that her father’s barge had been split in two, moments after she had spoken to him by video.
A body found by coastguards at Umm al Quwain up the coast from Dubai was registered as Landi, despite being “totally unrecognisable” due to missing skin, according to a person who has seen the initial autopsy report.
UAE police were slow to respond. A death certificate was issued on May 9, months after the death it declared on February 7, Italy’s foreign affairs ministry said. Italy’s request for a DNA test was turned down by the UAE following opposition by Landi’s wife Laura, it added.
The UAE foreign ministry and Dubai’s government did not respond to a request for comment.
Two diplomats told me that Landi’s wife, Laura, declined to hand in Landi’s passport and stopped returning calls. The embassy staff were not invited to any funeral, while Laura did not confirm whether he had died, even to Landi’s driver, they said.
The FT was unable to reach Laura directly for comment.
Those closest to Landi were struggling last year to process events, weighing up all the potential reasons Landi had for choosing to disappear, alongside those that his enemies might have for wishing he’d disappear.
Landi had faked his own death twice before and used the storm as an opportunity to do this for a third time, one of the diplomats alleged.
“I have so many doubts that he is actually dead,” Saahra told Italy’s state-owned broadcaster Rai in May. After seeing the body, Saahra’s brother said “it wasn’t him”, she told the TV broadcast.
Amedeo di Segni, the lawyer who said he represented Landi until last year, told the FT by email that he had “serious doubts about whether Samuele Landi is truly gone.”
He later said the FT’s version of events contained “a wealth of correct information, but some of it is completely incorrect, some is very incomplete and some essential procedural details are missing”. He declined to clarify further without payment.
But for the libertarians who followed Landi’s journeys, there was a very simple explanation for his disappearance: a cavalier attitude to safety at sea.
Landi’s barge “was rusting three times faster than it should have been, it was just bad luck with a bad product from China”, said Jedlička, the Liberland president.
Finally, late last year, the UAE agreed to send the body for forensic analysis. Italy’s foreign affairs ministry said a DNA test ordered by the Florence Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that the body was Landi’s.
Segni told me he had been informed by Florence’s attorney-general that the body was Landi’s — but that an autopsy report on cause of death had yet to be filed.
“That’s deep,” regulator Wilson Tarpeh said, when I asked whether there was any way Landi could still be alive. “Maybe he went through some metamorphosis, when you resurface somewhere with a new identity.”
Now he thought about it, he was not sure if he remembered meeting Landi after all.
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome and Chloe Cornish in Dubai
