Was It All Just One Big Lie? Your Egrant Questions Answered
It was either the mother of all scandals or the biggest lie in Malta’s political history. The bombshell dropped on April 20th 2017, after which a snap election was called, the Prime Minister was re-elected by a landslide, the journalist was assassinated and her whistleblower fled the country. Today, Malta finally has some answers.
First of all, what happened today?
After 15 long months, the results of a much-awaited inquiry into the Egrant allegations finally began to emerge. A 50-page executive summary of a 1,500-page investigation by Magistrate Aaron Bugeja was published, clearing the Prime Minister and his wife of claims that they owned a company in Panama called Egrant Inc.
At a press conference outlining the inquiry’s findings, Muscat shed tears of relief and insisted on the resignation of former Opposition leader Simon Busuttil. Some hours later, PN leader Adrian Delia kicked Busuttil out of his Shadow Cabinet and called on him to resign from the parliamentary group. However, Busuttil refused to do so and accused Delia of being in cahoots with Muscat.
So what exactly does the inquiry’s summary state?
The inquiry can be summarised in the magistrate’s final sentence: “One hundred threads of suspicion don’t stitch together a single strand of proof.”
The report gives a blow-by-blow account of every single allegation made by the late Daphne Caruana Galizia and her informant Maria Efimova, a former employee of Pilatus Bank. The inquiry concludes that Egrant was indeed bought by Nexia BT’s Brian Tonna, at the time Panama companies were also bought for Muscat’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi. However, there is absolutely no evidence that Egrant was ever transferred to anyone in the Muscat family, that it had a bank account at Pilatus Bank and that it had received large sums of money from a company owned by the ruling family of Azerbaijan.
But wasn’t there a document linking Michelle Muscat to Egrant?
Both Daphne Caruana Galizia and Maria Efimova had claimed there was a document proving Mossack Fonseca was holding shares of Egrant on behalf of Michelle Muscat and this was kept in a safe within the kitchen of Pilatus Bank. However, both women failed to produce this document to the magistrate and each said they were shown the document by the other.
The only copy of these declarations of trust were presented to the magistrate by former Malta Independent editor Pierre Portelli (today the Nationalist Party’s media chief), but these were found to have been falsified. UK experts deemed the signatures of a Mossack Fonseca nominee director to have been faked.
So who gave this document to Pierre Portelli?
This does not emerge from the executive summary and has never been stated. However, it is worth noting that Portelli had told Lovin Malta several months ago that he had received this document from a second source who was not Efimova or Caruana Galizia.
Who faked the document?
The executive summary does not delve into who may have concocted the whole story. However, the Prime Minister indicated that the full report does recommend criminal action against certain people, which is probably why it has not yet been published.
The magistrate does state in the summary that Caruana Galizia was only too willing to believe whatever Efimova told her and that Efimova had an axe to grind against both Pilatus Bank and the Maltese authorities, due to the way she had been treated when a criminal complaint was made against her by the bank.
Was everything Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote a lie?
Not quite. It is true that the daughters of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and the sons of Azeri minister Kamaladdin Heydarov both had Dubai companies with accounts at Pilatus Bank. While these did carry out transactions of large sums, there is no reason to believe that they did business with Maltese PEPs.
Caruana Galizia was also right in saying that former European Commissioner John Dalli had a Pilatus Bank account and that Keith Schembri held two, although it is not true that one of these was held in the name of his Panama company Tillgate.
It is also true that Pilatus Bank did process a loan very quickly to the sister of chairman Ali Sadr. However, there is no indication that some of this money was transferred to Michelle Buttigieg, an old friend of the Muscats who used to have a jewellery business with Michelle Muscat called Buttardi. Negarin Sadr’s loan was used to purchase shares in a pistachio farm in California, the inquiry claims.
Minister Konrad Mizzi never held a Pilatus Bank account.
So is Keith Schembri in the clear?
Keith Schembri receives very little mention in the inquiry. However, the magistrate does confirm there was a transaction received by one of his accounts from an account owned by Brian Tonna’s company Willerby. It does not delve into this transaction since this is the subject of a separate magisterial inquiry.
Why is anyone surprised that there was no evidence when this was spirited away in a suitcase that fateful night?
Well, the magistrate took these allegations very seriously. He actually obtained CCTV footage showing the movement of Pilatus Bank’s Ali Sadr throughout April 20th, from when he landed at Malta International Airport just before noon to when he left the bank and came face to face with a Net TV crew at night.
The magistrate absolutely dismissed that Sadr removed large quantities of documents from the bank. Sadr entered the bank with the same suitcases he was seen with at the airport, he only opened them once to remove a tablet, mobile phone and some stationary and put these items back in the suitcase before leaving. There was only one piece of paper he was given by a colleague which he took with him that night. The paper was not identified but CCTV footage appears to show Sadr did not give it much importance.
What about the flight to Baku?
There was indeed a flight to Baku in the early hours of April 21st 2017, but the magistrate disputes the idea that the flight was carrying documents from Pilatus Bank. According to an internal Vistajet email, the airline had received a request to fly to Baku to pick up some people and take them to Dubai earlier that day, and an aircraft in Malta was the closest available for the job. The plane flew out with no passengers or cargo.
So where did all the details come from?
The magistrate said he is convinced that Daphne Caruana Galizia gleaned her information about alleged payments to Egrant, Negarin Sadr and Michelle Buttigieg from an FIAU compliance report into Pilatus Bank that made reference to several questionable similarly-sized transactions. It turns out these transactions were referring to completely different people.
All the magistrate had to do was find prima facie evidence to justify further investigation. How did he conclude that all these allegations were false?
The magistrate’s main thrust is that Daphne Caruana Galizia and Maria Efimova contradicted each other so often and so blatantly in their respective testimonies that they were simply not credible. They even told Pierre Portelli that they had passed on documents to the magistrate when this was untrue. And for all their allegations, there was documentary proof to the contrary, or no evidence supporting their claims found by forensic accountants.
So was there a safe in the kitchen of Pilatus Bank?
This is still disputed but the inquiry concludes that there was a filing cabinet which may have been locked and stored in the kitchen for a while and this contained confidential information about some high profile bank clients, including Maltese PEPs.
Several Pilatus Bank employees referred to this filing cabinet as a safe. There was also a CCTV camera in the kitchen, which contradicts the claim that the safe was there to be out of sight.
What happens next?
It is probably too early to say. On the one hand, Joseph Muscat and his wife emerge triumphant and unscathed. So much so, that when questioned at this morning’s press conference on whether he would change his mind about stepping down before the next election, Muscat did not rule this out. Perhaps one should also not rule out his chances at a top EU position, previously thought to have been destroyed for good.
However, even though Muscat may be in the clear, the same cannot be said about the other protagonists on either side of this seemingly never-ending saga.
On the one hand, the full inquiry is not yet published and is likely to recommend criminal action against those who promulgated these lies. This may or may not include people like Efimova, former Opposition leader Simon Busuttil, Pierre Portelli, and, if she had not been killed in a car bomb last October, Daphne Caruana Galizia.
On the other hand, there remains the basic fact that while the Muscats never had a Panama company of their own, the same cannot be said for Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. In fact, there is clear email evidence showing that Nexia BT had tried to open bank accounts for these two companies and that these were set to receive almost €2 million from a mysterious Dubai company called 17 Black.
The public now awaits the conclusions of the other magisterial inquiries into these and other allegations of alleged money laundering and corruption.
What about Pilatus Bank?
While Ali Sadr may feel vindicated by today’s inquiry publication, the charges he is facing in the United States, which subsequently led to the seizure of his bank, have nothing to do with the Egrant inquiry and all to do with a sanction-dodging structure that was being investigated by the FBI, long before he employed Maria Efimova.
And what about the Nationalist Party?
If the rift between the current and previous leadership of the party had until recently started to be patched up, today’s developments have once again brought down the house of cards. Simon Busuttil is facing expulsion from the party he used to lead less than a year ago, and MPs who kept backing him after Adrian Delia was elected leader, now face a critical choice: move on from this chapter and pledge their support to Delia, or quit the party in a show of support for Busuttil?
Cover photo: Kurt Farrugia (Twitter)
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