Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  The European Parliament voted on a motion knocking down the passport sales scheme: 560 in favour, 22 against. The then Commissioner for Justice, Viviane Reding, snapped: ‘It is legitimate to question whether EU citizenship rights should merely depend on the size of someone’s wallet or bank account.’

  But in the EU, nation states determine immigration, citizenship, and passport laws, not Brussels. Malta gave the Passport King the green light and he started flogging his wares in the bazaars where rich people who want a new identity hang out.

  Henley & Partners sell Maltese passports. It works like this. The passports belong to the government of Malta. The marketing, the checks, the fine details, that’s all done by Henley & Partners. What the company sells, in a technical, narrow sense, is the know-how so that you end up with a passport. They’re the middlemen and they take a cut. They then ‘add value’ with products and services. In the case of Malta, for example, they act as real-estate agents, making extra cash from passport-buyers who need to fulfil their residency obligation to get their new Maltese passport.

  Right at the top of the list of questionable partners of Henley & Partners was Cambridge Analytica, the entity now infamous for scraping data off Facebook and using it to target swing voters and thus, the story goes, helped facilitate Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump’s election in the United States. The world owes a lot to the pioneering British journalist Carole Cadwalladr for spelling this out in the pages of The Observer and The Guardian. But, long before Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL became infamous, they were in bed, so to speak, with Henley & Partners in the Caribbean.

  The nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis is the smallest state in the western world, both physically and by population. The country has around 53,000 people. It is a democracy, true, but it is more like a small town than a nation state. The potential for corruption is huge. Saint Kitts is a crack in the pavement in the international rule of law, into which all manner of creatures of the night scurry and slide and slither.

  To sell passports, you need a country willing to do it. Quite a lot of states around the world now sell passports, including Britain. The catch is, the wealthier the country, the more the government and/or its journalists check up on the source of the individual’s wealth. So if you’re a dodgy crook with a stash of ill-gotten gains, then you might think twice about knocking on Britain’s door because they might not let you in or, if they do, it could get embarrassing quite quickly. But Saint Kitts is a different matter. Henley & Partners took over the government’s passport-selling operation in 2006 and made it much, much bigger.

  The problem for Henley & Partners is that governments in countries big or small often change. To ensure that their passport-selling wheeze was not reversed by an incoming new government they and their friends went to work on the general election in 2010. That year Henley & Partners and SCL rocked up on Saint Kitts. The prime minister of Saint Kitts was behind in the polls and the leader of the opposition was being critical of the passport sales. Watch this space.

  Alexander Nix of SCL/Cambridge Analytica was caught with his metaphorical pants down in 2018 by the UK’s Channel FourNews boasting of dirty tricks or ‘counter-ops’ in a classic sting. Nix told Channel Four News’ undercover cameras that his company deployed honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, among other tricks, to swing more than 200 elections around the world for his clients.

  Old Etonian Nix wasn’t all fur coat and no knickers. SCL really did sting the leader of the opposition on Saint Kitts in 2010, Lindsay Grant. They offered him a sweetheart deal, a $1m bribe in return for support in a land deal. Grant bit on the worm and suggested some nice offshore accounts the crooked money could be paid into. SCL’s people filmed the sting and then stuck it up on the internet. The result was that Grant tanked at the polls and the government, and Henley & Partners’ passport scheme, were safe, at least for a while.

  Henley & Partners and their pals also got involved in an election on the islands just up the road, as it were, in Saint Vincent. Officially, Henley & Partners boasts it ‘does not get involved in political campaigns’ but both Freddie Gray in The Spectator and Juliette Garside and Hilary Osborne in The Guardian got hold of a chunk of emails showing the Passport King, Christian Kälin, getting very closely involved in the election. His candidate lost, by the way.

  In 2019, the UK House of Commons select committee on the media reported on big tech’s abuse of data. Their report was called ’Disinformation and Fake News’. In a section of their report, the MPs looked at Henley & Partners. The Passport King would not have enjoyed the write-up.

  The select committee report is worth quoting at length:

  As we said in our Interim Report, SCL Elections and its associated companies, including Cambridge Analytica, worked on campaigns that were not financed in a transparent way, overstepping legal and ethical boundaries. Our Interim Report described the relationship between SCL Elections’ campaigning work and Christian Kälin, Chairman of Henley & Partners. We were told that, behind much of SCL Elections’ campaigning work was the hidden hand of Christian Kälin, Chairman of Henley & Partners, who arranged for investors to supply the funding to pay for campaigns, and then organised SCL to write their manifesto and oversee the whole campaign process. In exchange, Alexander Nix told us, Henley & Partners would gain exclusive passport rights for that country, under a citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programme. Alexander Nix and Christian Kälin have been described as having a ‘Faustian pact’. With the exclusive passport rights came a government that would be conducive to Mr Kälin and his clients.

  All concerned deny any wrongdoing.

  The MPs in their report noted that, in 2014, the UK issued a warning that ‘illicit actors’ – crooks in layperson’s English – were buying passports ‘for the purposes of evading US or international sanctions or engaging in other financial crime’. One reason for this warning was the fact that Saint Kitts (SKN) had removed ‘Place of Birth’ on its passport.

  The MPs noted the following people had acquired Saint Kitts and Nevis (SKN) passports:

  Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad: Iranian, acquired SKN passport via application managed by Henley & Partners in 2009; arrested by the US in March 2017 for money laundering sanctions violations and was bailed in May; currently subject to electronic monitoring and curfew; his Maltese bank, Pilatus, had its licence withdrawn in October 2018, for money laundering;

  Houshang Hosseinpour, Houshang Farsoudeh, and Pourya Nayebi: Iranian, acquired SKN passports in November 2011, December 2011, and November 2012 respectively; they used their SKN passports to acquire a bank in Georgia; all three men were sanctioned in 2014 by the US;

  Ren Biao: a Chinese national, who obtained his SKN passport in September 2013; he moved to SKN with his family in 2014, after China issued an Interpol red notice. He was wanted for allegedly acquiring $100m by defrauding state institutions;

  John Babikian, fled Canada in 2012 in the wake of tax evasion charges, holder of an SKN passport, prosecuted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2014 for stock fraud, and fined $3m.

  Of the four cases cited by the MPs, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad was the one who got his Saint Kitts passport via Henley & Partners.

  For the record, the MPs noted Henley & Partners’ rejection of any allegation of wrongdoing:

  Henley & Partners denies directly funding any election campaigns in the Caribbean on citizenship-by-investment at the same time that SCL was active in the region. A letter from Global Citizens, on behalf of Henley & Partners, was sent to the Committee in December 2018, stating: ‘It is natural that there would have been a certain amount of interaction among the numerous advisors and consultants. It is entirely incorrect, however, to suggest that Henley & Partners was a formal partner to SCL in any way.’

  Sven Hughes used to be a reservist in the British Army and served for a time in Afghanistan. He was also a copywriter for an advertising agency. One day in 2009 Alexander Nix popped into his office and made him a
n offer he couldn’t refuse. Work for SCL, go to the Caribbean, help out with an election in Saint Kitts and we will double your pay. Hughes said yes. Early on, he tripped over Christian Kälin’s operation. In 2018, when he was interviewed by Freddy Gray of The Spectator, Gray asked: ‘Did you meet Christian Kälin?’ Hughes said:

  It’s an interesting name. I didn’t meet him. The way we were asked to engage with him was through the use of Skype or invisible emails accounts, which you would neither send or receive emails but rather save your correspondence into the drafts folder.

  This unusual method of communication is also used by members of Islamic State to exchange messages with each other. It works when both parties know the password to the email account. The beauty of this method is you can delete the correspondence easily and then there is no proof it ever existed.

  Islamic State denies any wrongdoing.

  Did Hughes think that at this stage he should have smelt a rat, asked Gray?

  Within two weeks I had a conversation with Alexander Nix which was: ‘I’m worried to be here ethically, morally, and in some of the things I am seeing.’ Nix said: ‘If I’d told you the truth, you would never have joined us.’

  On the podcast Sven Hughes and Freddy Gray are both heard laughing.

  Hughes set out to try and reshape the election team in a proper way, as he saw it. He was employed by SCL and spoke to Nix every day but also found that he was communicating with Kälin every day or very often. Gray put it to him that Nix admitted (while being secretly filmed by Channel Four News) to dirty tricks, sting operations and so on. Hughes referenced the Saint Kitts campaign:

  It was not something I chose to do or actioned. I was winning the election … by running a clean campaign … In each campaign, there was an occasion where, between Alexander Nix and Chris Kälin in some capacity and I don’t know to what extent whose idea it was each time, but some sort of doubling-down, sting was introduced to make sure the campaign won. So in Saint Kitts and Nevis, the very thing he spoke about on Channel Four News, with paying bribes, yes, that was a technique that they utilised in Saint Kitts and Nevis. I’m equally frustrated by this. We didn’t need to do this. We were winning. It wasn’t necessary. However, I wasn’t the boss.

  Hughes was privy to the Lindsay Grant sting but unhappy about it. There was a second operation in Saint Vincent, the amplification of sexual abuse charges against one politician. Hughes did not like this either but found it happened. Gray put it to Hughes, that Nix won the election, then Kälin sold the passports. That was how Hughes saw it too. In one of his campaigns, Hughes and his team insisted on a live-in armed guard in the villa where his team was based. He feared that his bosses were not paying enough attention to their duty of care: “I explicitly stated, ‘You are going to get someone killed.’”

  Hughes was so worried about safety on one Caribbean island that he worked out a fast exit route, a fast boat or a plane, in case of trouble. After a year, he left SCL in 2010 and created his own company which, he says, is more ethical.

  In 2012 Hughes’s former deputy at SCL, Daniel Muresan, was found dead in a hotel room. He had been working for SCL on the tightly fought elections in Kenya. Daniel was the only child of a former Romanian agriculture minister, Iona Avram Muresan, who had been sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzlement. The Romanian newspaper Adevarul reported his father saying:

  They found him in his hotel room. He had his laptop on his lap, the telly was still on and there was a glass of wine next to him. He enjoyed drinking a glass of wine before going to sleep.

  Muresan, who was thought to be in his early 30s, died of a heart attack. That was listed as the cause of death on the certificate sent by fax to the Gherla prison in Romania where his father was serving his sentence, Adevarul reported. His father reportedly feared his son had been poisoned in relation to his own embezzlement case.

  ‘Dan,’ said Hughes reflecting on the time they had both worked for SCL, ‘was my deputy on the election side of the business. A wonderful man, we were living together under armed guard in Saint Vincent.’

  In 2012, Hughes, now working for his own company, got a call from Alexander Nix: ‘he wanted me to work for him in the US.’ Hughes said no. ‘And then Nix said at the very end of the call: “oh and by the way Dan’s dead.” He said he’d got so drunk he drowned in his own vomit on the Kenyatta campaign.’ Hughes said he didn’t know what had happened but on the podcast repeated his concerns that SCL in his experience did not do enough to ensure the safety of their team.

  Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie – he of the dyed pink hair – told the British MPs on the media select committee in 2018 that he had been worried that Muresan, his predecessor as head of elections, might have been murdered. Wylie said Muresan was poisoned after ‘a deal went sour. People suspected he was poisoned in his bedroom,’ Wylie said, adding that the Kenyan police had been ‘bribed not to enter his hotel room for 24 hours’.

  Wylie added that the claims were merely ‘speculation’ he had heard from others inside the company and that he had no proof of the allegations. ‘What I heard was that he was working on some kind of deal of some sort,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what kind of deal it is. But when you work for senior politicians in a lot of these countries you don’t actually make money in the electoral work – you make money in the influence brokering after the fact – and that a deal went sour.’ He added: ‘Again, this is what I’ve been told, so I’m not saying this as a matter of fact, but people suspected that he was poisoned in his hotel room.’

  The authors asked Alexander Nix to comment about the death of Dan Muresan. Nix pointed out that the tragic death of ‘my very good friend and colleague, Dan Muresan, in Kenya was thoroughly investigated at the time by the local police and the Romanian Embassy and there was no suggestion that his death was anything other than a terrible accident’. Nix also quoted an independent report by Julian Malins QC saying it concluded that:

  (Dan Muresan’s) death was certainly unexpected, but I have found nothing in the circumstances to suggest that he was murdered. None of those closely involved at the time (the police and family and embassy staff) thought that he was murdered. The autopsy findings did not suggest murder. His death was, in fact, the kind of very sad event that can happen to a young man on a Saturday night, who has been drinking. To suggest to the world’s press that he was murdered was an irresponsible act, no doubt causing pain to his loved ones.

  Wylie painted a picture of SCL/Cambridge Analytica as a lawless organization that had dealt with hacked material, illegal data, and the use of intimidation techniques to win elections.

  Sven Hughes was more measured in the podcast but his message was similar to Wylie’s. Was Hughes aware of accusations that Cambridge Analytica was doing fake news, asked Gray? Hughes recalled that ‘at the time, because I was asking inconvenient questions through my year there, I became cut off from my dealing with Christian Kälin pretty much completely and was set aside from those techniques … So I left. I voted with my feet.’

  Hughes’s answer is striking. When asked about fake news, Hughes refers to Kälin of Henley & Partners, not to Nix of Cambridge Analytica.

  After establishing their business model in the Caribbean, Henley & Partners made a move on Malta. The beauty of Malta is that it is a European Union state and allows free movement of people and capital inside the world’s biggest market, passport-free travel inside the Schengen Area, comprising 26 states and 400 million people, and visa-free travel to almost anywhere in the world, including the United States.

  But a passport that good costs money. Whereas a Saint Kitts passport could cost $250,000 at most, a Maltese one costs around €650,000 for the passport alone but there are also the trimmings. Family members cost €25,000 each. You have to buy €150,000 worth of government stock, an outlay you can get back in five years’ time. To buy a passport you need to own property in Malta or rent for five years. So if you have a spouse and two kids, purchase the government s
tock and buy or rent, the whole shebang could set you back something close to €1 million. The numbers of golden passports sold via Henley & Partners’s know-how with the sanction of Malta’s government amounted to, by December 2018 (the time of the last available data), around 2,500. That’s a revenue stream worth, roughly, €2.5 billion. The exact amount of money coming in is not known. The lion’s share of that money goes to the government of Malta. But Henley & Partners’ cut – 5% or more, again the exact numbers are not known – adds up to a tidy sum.

  Henley & Partners are making a killing.

  In a nutshell the governments of little states in the Caribbean, and Malta too, were offered a deal: we – SCL/Cambridge Analytica – will help you win your election and in return, once elected, you pass laws enabling a different crew – Henley & Partners – to sell passports.

  The evidence suggests that the Mr Big of the whole operation may not be the obvious figure, Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica, but in fact could be the clever Swiss, Christian Kälin, because selling passports is where the big money is. One should note three things: first, that according to Companies House in London, both SCL and Cambridge Analytica are in liquidation; second, that Henley & Partners issued a statement in 2018: ‘Dr Kälin has not interacted with Alexander Nix for many years and does not consider him a “friend”’; and third, that Henley & Partners is thriving.

  The pattern set up in the Caribbean repeated itself in Malta long before the 2013 elections. The visitors from outer space, sorry, Cambridge Analytica/SCL and Henley & Partners, arrive, offer their deal, ‘we will help you win your election, then you will rewrite your passport laws’. The election is won, the passport laws are rewritten, then the crooks, sorry high value clients, come in.