Sliema’s Sparkasse Bank Malta plc has been named as having been allegedly involved in a money-laundering scam that goes all the way up to Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

Last week, a criminal complaint filed in the courts of Miami connected the Venezuelan president and his three stepsons to an international money-laundering scheme that saw over $1 billion stolen from the Venezuelan government-owned oil company PDVSA between 2014 and 2015.

Now, sources within the Maltese Police Force (which has been working on the international investigation with US federal agents for nearly two years) have shed some more light on the issue.

Speaking to The Times Of Malta, police sources called the investigation “one of the biggest we have been working on in recent years” and “an ongoing matter for quite some time.”

Following last weekend’s revelations by the Sunday Times of Malta naming the Swiss-owned P.C.M Limited as the Maltese firm at the centre of the scandal, today’s reveal of Sparkasse Bank is the second Maltese institution to be mentioned at the heart of the scandal.

This is not the first time that Sparkasse Bank found itself at the heart of controversy.

The Sliema bank, which is actually a subsidiary of the Austrian Savings Bank and Estre Bank Group, had been mentioned in the Panama Papers data leak as the local bank being used by Mossack Fonseca, the controversial money-laundering Panamanian law firm that started making international headlines back in April 2016.

Lovin Malta has reached out to Sparkasse Bank for a statement on today’s revelations, but had not yet received a reply at the time of writing.

What do you make of this latest development? Let us know in the comments below

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David Grech Urpani

Lovin Malta's Head of Content, Dave has been in journalism for the better half of the last decade. Prefers Instagram, but has been known to doomscroll on TikTok. Loves chicken, women's clothes and Kanye West (most of the time).