Electrogas investor Paul Apap Bologna remains faithful in Malta’s power station project, despite major shareholder Gasan Group’s announced exit this week.

He told Times of Malta that the power station requested a legal and forensic review of all its affairs by an international law firm, while several corruption claims emerged over the details of the deal.

Apap Bologna took over the role of Electrogas director from Yorgen Fenech, who is the prime suspect of the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. He also holds shares via CP Holdings, a medicine importation company owned by the Apap Bologna family.

He said he was satisfied with the contents of the review, and that Electrogas always welcomed scrutiny from authorities.

The ElectroGas consortium was selected to build and operate the LNG power station in Delimara back in October 2013, with a deal eventually signed in April 2015.

ElectroGas is equally owned by three companies – German conglomerate Siemens, Azeri state energy company Socar and GEM Holdings, a Maltese business venture.

GEM Holdings is split between four companies. Tumas Energy and Gasan Enterprises each own roughly 35% of the company. CP Holdings owns about 20%, while a separate company owned by Yorgen Fenech owns about 8%.

Last week, Gasan Group said they were “mortified” by the allegations and would pursue an exit strategy from the deal. A day later, representatives from Siemens were in Malta to discuss their position.  

Key ElectroGas players had been flogging the project to separate governments for years. In 2009, shareholder Paul Apap Bologna had presented the then-PN government a proposal for the building of a new power station.

The power station, one of Labour’s key tenure issues in the 2013 general election, was sold to the public as a way of producing clean energy and improving electricity generation efficiency, allowing the government to significantly slash tariffs.

However, the deal itself has raised eyebrows for several years, especially after the Daphne Project revealed in 2018 that ElectroGas was using one of its partners, Socar, as a middleman, when purchasing LNG, instead of purchasing directly at source.

Caruana Galizia’s son Matthew recently said that his mother could have been killed to stop her writing about a trove of ElectroGas documents that were leaked to her.

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