PN Calls For Egrant Inquiry To Be Revisited After ‘Architects’ Behind Companies Charged With False Declarations
The Nationalist Party has called for the Egrant magisterial inquiry to be revisited after Nexia BT’s partners were charged with a range of serious accusations.
“The argument which has been used to dismiss the serious Egrant allegations was that documents were falsified,” PN MP Beppe Fenech Adami told a press conference.
“Now we know that the people who set up the Panama companies [Nexia BT partners Brian Tonna and Karl Cini] are facing a number of charges, one of which is, wonder of wonders, the falsification of documents.”
In 2017, now-assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote that the Panama company Egrant belongs to Michelle Muscat, wife of then Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.
However, a magisterial inquiry found no evidence linking Egrant to the Muscats and also found falsified signatures in alleged declarations of trust that were handed to him by then Malta Independent editor-in-chief Pierre Portelli.
Joseph Muscat breaks down in tears after announcing the findings of the Egrant inquiry in 2018
Noting that the inquiry didn’t establish who owns Egrant and why it was set up in the first place, Fenech Adami said it’s in the national interest for these two questions to be answered and urged the authorities to investigate on their own accord,
“We know that the architects of Egrant, as well as the Panama companies owned by Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are currently in a prison cell.”
“We know that Schembri’s and Mizzi’s Panama companies were set up to receive money from 17 Black, which is owned by the suspected mastermind in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia [Yorgen Fenech]. Yes, the authorities have a duty to revisit the Egrant inquiry.”
Last Saturday, Tonna and Cini were charged with money laundering, crimes connected to corruption, submitting false declarations to authorities, fraud, and giving false statements to the courts.
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