(Bloomberg) -- Venezuela has denied a report by Spain’s ABC newspaper that said President Nicolas Maduro ordered in 2010 the sending of 3.5 million euros ($3.9 million) to the country’s consulate in Milan to fund the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.

The article alleges that a small suitcase was handed to Gianroberto Casaleggio, a Five Star co-founder, through Venezuela’s consul in Milan, Gian Carlo di Martino. It cites what it says is a classified document of Venezuelan military intelligence. Maduro was foreign affairs minister at that time.

The report has caused waves in Italy, where all the major papers have picked up the story and placed it in their front pages given that it affects the biggest force in parliament and the main backer of the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

A spokeswoman for the Venezuelan embassy in Rome said the document cited was a forgery and that authorities were considering legal action. Five Star’s acting political leader Vito Crimi dismissed the report as “simply ridiculous and fanciful fake news” in a statement sent by his office. Five Star is also considering legal action, he said.

Five Star was founded in 2009 by Gianroberto Casaleggio and Beppe Grillo, a former TV comic, as an anti-establishment movement. It entered government for the first time in 2018 in coalition with the anti-migrant League of Matteo Salvini, under Conte.

‘Fake News’

Davide Casaleggio, son of Five Star’s late co-founder Gianroberto Casaleggio, also branded the report fake news, in a post on the movement’s blog. “The Five Star Movement has always been funded in a transparent way and we are the only ones to have made public all the accounts, even in detail, even before the law requested it,” he wrote.

It is not the first time questions have been raised on what kind of ties Venezuela has with some political parties. In Spain, Unidas Podemos, is the junior partner in the coalition government and several of its founders did political consulting and research work in the country before the radical left party was founded in 2014.

Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, has in the past also spoken in support of the Venezuelan regime, although he and others has since denounced the situation in the country. Iglesias himself in 2018 said in the Spanish Senate that he no longer supported comments he had made in the past about the country.

The party and Iglesias denied accusations by critics of being funded by Venezuela.

(Adds details on previous reports and denials about Podemos’s ties with Venezuela)

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