Police Won’t Say If PN Leader Is Being Investigated For Money Laundering
One of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s final big stories before she was assassinated in a car bomb last month was about Opposition leader Adrian Delia who she claimed helped launder £1.4 million from a prostituting ring in Soho over a decade ago.
Delia filed several law suits against Caruana Galizia, saying he was just holding an account for his client and did not know from where the money originated. He dropped the law suits after Caruana Galizia’s murder.
Lovin Malta sent questions to the police towards the end of August, asking whether they are investigating or intend to start investigating Delia for money laundering. A reminder e-mail was sent in October.
This week, the police’s media arm has finally responded. But the one-liner answer will probably only stimulate curiosity further:
“Kindly note that at this stage, the police has no comments to make on this issue.”
Delia’s summer campaign for the PN leadership was rocked when Caruana Galizia reported how he had used a bank account in the tax haven of Jersey to process proceeds from brothels in London.
The brothels were owned by Delia’s client Eucharist Bajada and rented out to his younger brother Emanuel Bajada and his wife Eve Bajada, who then sub-let it to others. One of the brothels, in Greek Street, was raided by the British police in 2003 and the couple who ran it – Vethasalem Muruganathan and Guilnara Gadzijeva – were arrested and jailed. It later transpired how the couple had entrapped Eastern European women by putting out ads for domestic servants but then forcing them to work as prostitutes by threatening to kill their families.
The story was broken by now-assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia
Caruana Galizia reported the pimps who ran the brothels would then transfer the money (£20,000 a month) to Eve Bajada in cash as ‘rent’ and she would then deposit it in smaller sums to Adrian Delia’s Jersey bank account. Delia would then transfer that same money to bank accounts linked to two offshore companies, one in the Bahamas and one in the Marshall Islands. A legal letter published by Caruana Galizia indicates the companies were owned by Eucharist Bajada, who was Adrian Delia’s client.
MaltaToday revealed in August that Delia and now economy minister Chris Cardona used to be the directors of the Bahamas company.
Delia has repeatedly denied knowledge of his client’ business transactions, arguing his relationship with him was limited to a lawyer-client one.
At some point, the Bajadas eventually noticed that around £1.4 million which should have been paid from Delia’s Jersey bank account into the corresponding bank accounts had gone missing. Indeed, a letter to Delia by British law firm Carter Lemons Camerons in December 2003 shows that Emanuel Bajada had pressured the now Opposition leader to disclose the final source of the missing money.
Emanuel Bajada later encountered problems of his own in Malta when he was charged and later convicted of running two brothels out of guest-houses in Sliema and St Julian’s. His defence lawyer at the time was Chris Cardona.
In 2004, ownership of the house in Greek Street was transferred to Mark Barbara – now Chris Cardona’s chauffeur – and later to a BVI-registered company called Maybole.
The reports prompted the PN’s administrative council and then leader Simon Busuttil to urge Adrian Delia to withdraw from the PN leadership race. However, Delia insisted it was all a lie cooked up by Caruana Galizia out of fear she would lose her grip on the Nationalist Party if he was elected leader. He also filed four libel suits against the journalist but dropped them a day after she was assassinated.
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