by Carlo Bonini
Ben Nasan, and other witnesses who never made it to the stand in Malta, testify that Neville Gafà ‘sold’ medical visas to tens of thousands of Libyans for what the Italians would call tangenti, loosely translated as ‘backhanders’.
Ben Nasan presented text messages from Gafà urging him to ‘resume their business’. But the police did not ask Gafà what ‘business’ he was seeking to resume.
In November 2018 Libyan sources informed the Maltese press that they saw Neville Gafà in Tripoli, Libya. When challenged he said he was there on holiday which, given the civil war there, is, to be kind, unlikely.
Days later official photographs appeared on the official Facebook page of Libya’s government of Neville Gafà having what appeared to be talks with the Libyan home minister. Gafà is accompanied by Kenneth Camilleri, the prime minister’s personal bodyguard.
Libyan sources would tell the Maltese press that, on his Tripoli ‘holiday’, Gafà used the Maltese embassy’s official car and other resources of the embassy that was technically closed because of security concerns.
The Maltese foreign ministry said Gafà doesn’t work for them and he wasn’t there on their business. The health ministry, which is shown on Gafà’s business card as his employer, said they had thrown him out. The prime minister said Gafà was doing ‘important work’ but could not say who Gafà really worked for.
Then sources produced another piece of information. While on ‘holiday’, Neville Gafà was seen having a chinwag with Haytham al Tajouri, one of the most powerful warlords of Tripoli. Gafà said in his defence he ‘stumbled’ on Mr al Tajouri and he was just being polite, as one does when on holiday.
In 2016 the United Nations Panel of Experts on Libya reported to the UN Security Council on the situation in that country and accused Tripoli militia leader Haytham al Tajouri of financial fraud and human rights infringements.
The UN report says:
Haytham al Tajouri created a private detention centre in Tajura’s ostrich farm, where he detained former regime officials and sympathisers. He extorted large sums of money from visitors. During Operation Fajr operations in July 2014, 12 former regime officials disappeared from his facility. His claim that he had handed them over to their families was denied by government sources.
Another possibility is that Gafà was not on holiday in Libya at all but trading in medical visas with a brutal warlord. The warlord denies any wrongdoing. The former optician’s assistant denies any wrongdoing as well.
When Muscat succeeded Alfred Sant as leader of the Labour Party, there was no tradition of the Labour leader’s spouse playing a prominent role in politics. Dom Mintoff’s wife was English, timid, private, and lived most of her life avoiding the limelight and her abusive, philandering husband. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was a lifelong bachelor. Alfred Sant and his wife were separated before he was elected.
In contrast, the PN politicians were models of Catholic probity. Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi were married, monogamous, heterosexual heads of picture-perfect nuclear families.
Joseph Muscat bucked his party’s trend. When he became leader of the PL, he was married to Michelle, who was in Daphne’s sights as vain, shallow, and greedy.
This March 2017 post on Daphne’s blog should give you a taste:
Why are we paying to keep Mrs Muscat’s father in private healthcare when they spend €15,000 on a six-day holiday?
No, really, it’s just so bloody insulting and offensive. And this is a point that has been completely overlooked. The taxpayer has to foot the bill to keep Mrs Muscat’s father in a private care home, and until late 2015 paid €40,000 a year to keep both her parents at Villa Messina, where they abusively occupied two government-sponsored places to the detriment of people who genuinely can’t afford to pay.
While taxpayers pay for her father to stay at a private care home, probably while their own parents are at St Vincent de Paul Hospital or paying their own way, Mrs Muscat thinks nothing of blowing around €15,000 on a six-day holiday in Dubai – just one of several holidays she takes every year with her children and occasionally with her husband.
This is disgraceful. If she can afford those holidays, she shouldn’t expect the rest of us to pay her father’s bills at a private care home. And we should demand an explanation.
Michelle Muscat may have not been Daphne’s favourite person, but she was a blessing to PL spin doctors, who were not unaware of the advantages of pitching Muscat as a family man to a broadly Catholic electoral base.
Michelle, then Tanti, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Malta. Professionally, she only really put her skills to productive work as personal secretary to Sant when he was leader of opposition.
Muscat courted Michelle at a time when their engagement would prove useful to him. There is no suggestion their love was not genuine. His direct access to the party leader’s office would have come in handy.
During Muscat’s first term as MEP in 2007, the couple had had twin daughters and Michelle’s fulltime job was being photographed beaming for her husband’s political flyers.
A year earlier, Michelle had set up an online accessories business called Buttardi with her friend Michelle Buttigieg. She used the nom de guerre Michelle Muscat-Tanti and was listed on the Buttardi website as ‘European Sales and Promotion Manager’.
In 2012 Daphne wrote how she had found herself picking out a Buttardi necklace at an accessories shop when looking for a gift. In her inimitable style, she wrote:
Hang on, I said to myself when I saw the Buttardi label. That’s Michelle Muscat’s pin-money thing. No way am I going to buy one of her frigging giżirani (necklaces), no way am I going to give it to a friend (she’ll think I’m spoofing her – ‘Here’s one that the Mexxej tal-Partit Laburista (Labour Leader)’s wife made earlier’) and no way would she ever wear it, on principle.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I told the girl behind the counter. ‘I’m taking this handbag instead.’
Years later Buttardi would be back in the news.
When Muscat became prime minister in 2013, Michelle was determined to be quite unlike all the previous spouses, who had dabbled in charity work and tagged along to events, but whose life generally remained private.
Michelle, however, took on a greater role. She patronised local fashion designers and wore their creations on public occasions. She polished her edges with cosmetic surgery. And she set up an office of her own with staff and a public calendar.
Daphne in November 2013:
The Sunday Circle is running an interview with the prime minister’s wife, who has been photoshopped to the point where she looks like a cyborg. It’s not as though we don’t get to see her in real life, so this extreme photoshopping business is a really bad idea as it makes her look terribly insecure about her appearance.
The entire interview is carried in the link below, so you needn’t bother getting the magazine unless you wish to cut out Mrs Muscat’s photographs and frame them with a red candle lit beneath.
The Hello magazine style of questioning is all about how Mrs Muscat is a mother first and foremost (because nobody has ever had children before) and how she is determined to give them a normal life – you know, by flying them to Manhattan during school days, taking them to receptions at Dar Malta in Brussels in the evening, and hauling them off to meet the Pope (‘he’s just like a village priest’ says Mrs Ignorant, missing all the signs of somebody gracious who is scaling his conversation down to her level).
How many more of these Evita Peronesque interviews are we going to have before the situation is completely milked dry? At least Evita Peron had no children. Mrs Muscat is hell-bent on shoving hers down everyone’s throat while her political sidekicks become hysterical at any criticism of the situation, describing it in terms of a Herodian massacre of innocents.
Perhaps inspired by the comparison to Peron, Michelle set up her own charity, the Marigold Foundation, a catch-all NGO ‘that addresses soc
ial behaviour, health issues, special needs and education’.
For her efforts, in March 2017 she was awarded the title ‘Volunteer of the Year’ by the government-controlled Council for the Voluntary Sector. It later emerged she had signed her own nomination for the award.
In 2015 Michelle started an annual solo swim to raise funds for her charity. That first year she crossed the Malta-Gozo channel which is 5km wide. Daphne wrote:
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have her down as a long-distance swimmer – more as one of those women who get into the water and then swim on the spot while nattering to each other.
Since then the event has grown into an annual carnival. Michelle is escorted by army boats and helicopters and stretches of her swim are broadcast live on national TV.
In 2019, her husband congratulated her for swimming 15 kilometres in choppy open seas in just over four hours, a swimming pace comparable to Olympic open sea events.
When out at sea, she is prevented from speaking which helps manage the risk of political embarrassment. Her public utterances are kept to a minimum, mostly because they often prove awkward and counter-productive. When the Muscats first moved into Castille, the prime minister’s wife told an interviewer the family had every intention of ‘making the most’ of their time in high office.
They would live up to that promise. The couple’s children travelled first-class to every imaginable destination on their father’s official business trips, frequently missing school to be wheeled out on official events where the presence of children was, many felt, inappropriate.
This behaviour would not escape Daphne’s criticism. Nor would the fact that Michelle would open up the prime minister’s official residence to her friends to use as a setting for commercial fashion shows, ostensibly promoting local talent.
In 2014, a minor scandal erupted when one of Michelle’s designer friends, Mary Grace Pisani, used the prime minister’s wife’s good offices to ‘encourage’ female prison inmates to work for her curtain manufacturing business. The project was introduced under the auspices of Michelle’s charity but the curtains produced by the prison inmates were sold commercially. The inmates were paid a pittance to produce the curtains and were paid late, had no recourse to complaint, and had no one looking out for their interests.
Michelle defended her charity and her friend, but her public quotes to the press were replete with contradictions and failed even the most basic fact checks.
That same year Michelle, whose husband had been prime minister for less than a year, was commissioned to do a little informal international diplomacy. An uninteresting photo exhibition was being held at the presidential palace in Valletta with the rather grand title of ‘Children’s Eyes on the Earth’.
Malta’s presidents are figureheads and hold no political power. Apart from constitutional symbolism, their main efforts go towards raising money for charity by, for example, organising an exhibition.
But this particular exhibition was brought to Malta by Leyla Aliyeva, daughter of Ilham Aliyev, president of the fabulously corrupt Azerbaijan. Aliyeva has no official or state role in Azerbaijan. Ostensibly for that reason, she was hosted in Malta by the prime minister’s wife who also holds no public office. During her sojourn in Malta, Aliyeva stayed with the Muscats at the prime minister’s official summer residence in Girgenti in the west of Malta.
Daphne ’s antennae went up:
Why in heaven’s name are we sucking up to Leyla Aliyeva, the Azerbaijan dictator’s daughter, a woman who makes the international news for all the wrong reasons? Azerbaijan does not have a royal dynasty. This woman is not a hereditary princess, but the daughter of a man who rigs elections to stay in power, controlling his country through a corrupt and oppressive regime.
Yet here she is, hosted like royalty by Malta’s head of state and by the wife of the Maltese prime minister, feted, and toasted. ‘Oh but it’s an exhibition for children! A photography exhibition!’ Wrong, and wrong. You have to ask yourself WHY the exhibition was held in Malta and why, more pertinently, it was held at the presidential palace, hosted by the head of state, and why Mrs Muscat entertained this corrupt dictator’s daughter at her husband’s official summer residence, Girgenti Palace, which she has somehow made her own personal territory.
There’s something very wrong going on here.
There wasn’t much more than intuition in those remarks. And, of course, knowing enough about Azerbaijan to connect some dots. Leyla Aliyeva owned three banks in Azerbaijan. In 2010, the Washington Post had reported that, along with the rest of her family, she owned real estate in Dubai worth some $75 million.
Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who is a target of regular acts of oppression by her country’s government and who collaborated with Daphne, had been documenting the Aliyevs’ corrupt conduct for several years.
In 2018, The Guardian reported that, a few months after her visit to Malta, Aliyeva and one of her sisters Arzu agreed to buy a £60 million property in London using secret offshore companies.
There was more to raise Daphne’s suspicions in those glamorous photo-ops of Michelle Muscat and Aliyeva.
As an MEP starting in 2004, Joseph Muscat spent some time serving on the European Parliament’s joint commission with the Azerbaijani Parliament. The Azerbaijani Parliament, such as it is, is a satellite of the political and personal interests of Aliyev. The president’s own party holds a considerable majority in the assembly, facing a minority made of government-leaning parties, so-called independents and a ‘soft opposition’.
This effectively means that engagement with Azerbaijani parliamentarians amounts to engagement with Aliyev.
When Muscat became PL leader and prime minister he was in a position to help those friends he had made while MEP, such as the Azerbaijan regime. In October 2013 Aliyev’s party won the parliamentary elections by a staggering 85% of the vote in a ballot which the OSCE described as being beset by ‘widespread irregularities, including ballot-box stuffing and what appeared to be fraudulent counting’.
Muscat’s appointee, Speaker Anġlu Farrugia, he of the dodgy teen arrests, was present in Azerbaijan and he judged the elections as ‘fair, democratic and transparent’. But he would, wouldn’t he?
It is hard to imagine a fair, democratic, and transparent election electing any party, let alone one that belongs to an autocrat, with 85% of the vote.
By 2013, the Azerbaijani government had already become notorious for its ways of persuading Western politicians to take rather surprising positions sympathetic to the regime. A year previously, a report by the European Stability Initiative rocked the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe when its members accepted absurdly generous gifts from the Azerbaijani government including black caviar worth hundreds of euro. Azerbaijan’s form of trading in influence was swiftly branded ‘caviar diplomacy’.
The final piece of information hanging on the washing line was the apparently innocuous opening of a photo exhibition almost no one would go to see. And as always, Daphne was on it.
In September 2013, five months before Aliyeva’s visit, Malta’s state-owned energy company sealed a deal for a new power station and the energy it would produce for the next 18 years with a consortium named Electrogas. A third of the consortium was owned by Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company, Socar.
There’s something very wrong going on here.
Daphne wrote about the setting up of shell companies for Mizzi and Schembri in 2016. But there were many loose ends and many unanswered questions and she would be busy looking into them for the next several months.
In February 2017, when the question ‘who owns Egrant, the third Panama company?’ had been on everyone’s lips for a year, Daphne got in touch with a source who had written to her a few months previously, complaining about the unfair employment practices of a small, obscure bank where she worked.
The source was not altogether au fait with the intricacies of Maltese politics or even the character
of Michelle Muscat. She was a Russian woman and had only lived in Malta for just over a year.
Her name was Maria Efimova and Daphne would help her become Malta’s most famous whistleblower.
THE PASSPORT KING
Daphne’s scorn was a flight of red tracer bullets arching through the night sky. Sometimes her writing had beauty and power but it was always deadly.
Take Henley & Partners. The name of the company sounds like it could be the manufacturer of posh biscuits. Instead, Henley & Partners describe themselves as ‘the world’s leading expert in private client residence and citizenship planning, and specifically in providing advice on comparative citizenship law and the acquisition of alternative citizenship.’
Daphne didn’t quite see it the same way. ‘These scamming crooks,’ she called them. She went on to say that:
the scamming crooks… are treating us Maltese in the same way they might have treated a tribe of jungle natives 200 years ago: profiteering off us because they think we Maltese are all as stupid, greedy, backward and corrupt as our tribal leaders. I’d like to see them putting up travelling sideshows selling British or Canadian passports – but it’s not going to happen, is it, because we’re the remote island natives who’ve been gulled into selling our land for beads and a couple of bolts of cloth.
The chairman of Henley & Partners is Christian Kälin, a Swiss entrepreneur who is widely known as ‘The Passport King’ and likes to declare that ‘citizenship is inherently unjust’.
His solution to this injustice is to find microstates in the Caribbean or Europe and get them to enact new laws which allow the sale of passports to people with a lot of money. Funnily enough, people with a lot of money who wish to obtain a new passport often turn out to be crooks.
In January 2014, prime minister Muscat, his cronies, and the Passport King flew to Brussels to pitch to the European Commission their new passport-selling wheeze. The European Commission hated it, concluding the sales of citizenship ‘called into question the very concept of European citizenship.’