Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  The Accountancy Board, which is a statutory regulator with the power to withdraw an accountant’s license, has said that it will only consider Brian Tonna and Karl Cini’s cases if and when they are convicted by a criminal court of law.

  The Passport King’s funny business enraged Daphne. Henley & Partners hired a fancy London law firm Mishcon de Reya, to try and shut her up. Fat chance of that.

  This was one salvo from her blog on 12 May 2017:

  The damage caused to Malta by the sale of citizenship is unquantifiable. Malta is not Saint Kitts & Nevis. It is interlocked with the rest of the European Union and has a European economy. Keith Schembri and his sidekick Joseph Muscat think that selling Maltese/EU citizenship is free money, because you’re selling a small piece of paper document, that costs you nothing, for €650,000. They and a legion of other bell-ends who are so busy selling passports that they can’t see straight because they’re blinded by $£€$£€ look only at the revenue and don’t see the massive cost in terms of reputational damage to Malta, and the fall-out from that which we are seeing now.

  I and thousands of others are glad that Busuttil – then leader of the opposition Nationalist Party – has committed himself to ending it. No wonder Henley & Partners has broken out into a cold sweat. Regardless of their claims to the contrary, Malta is their only EU-passports-like-pastizzi money-tap. And the Maltese government is the only EU member state government with which they have a contract – and not just a contract but crooks at the wheel, including the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. Note to Henley & Partners: if you send me another cease-and-desist letter with a warning not to publish it, I’m going to publish it, then print it and use it when I next take the dog for a walk. If I’m angry enough, I might then even post it back to you.

  She finished off her blog with the following hashtag: #nomorecrooks.

  Christian Kälin replied, sounding more hurt than angry. Daphne, being Daphne, posted Kälin’s reply on her blog:

  Hi Daphne. I just was made aware of this post. Did you receive another letter that upset you or what is the issue? I understood from our interactions, and from Mishcon’s last communication (which was, however, quite some time ago) that you had agreed to remove the defamatory and incorrect posts on your blog. Kindly advise. Basically we will need you to remove not everything of course, but those statements that are clearly defamatory and incorrect. If that is not done we have no other choice than following the advice of our lawyers and start proceedings in London as this is where all of this internet blogs has most impact on our business. Hopefully we can avoid that and continue a reasonable dialogue, which I always find is better than any alternative. We simply want to stay out of the political issues Malta faces and do our business – in Malta or elsewhere. Hope you understand …

  Best Chris

  Dr. Christian H. Kälin TEP IMCM Group

  Chairman & CEO Henley & Partners Holdings Ltd.

  Daphne fired back on 12 May:

  Christian, I am extremely annoyed at your lawyers’ high-handed attitude and more than annoyed at the fact that a company feels itself empowered to sell a country’s citizenship against the will of the citizens of that country and by underhand agreement with a government that does not have an electoral mandate for it and then has the sheer brass neck to begin going after journalists and real citizens of that country who object to it.

  If this government is voted out, you will have no trade in Maltese passports at all, and the vast majority of citizens of this country hope it happens.

  As I had occasion to tell you when we met, Malta is not Saint Kitts & Nevis. You can behave like a colonial power, throwing your weight about against the press and legitimate criticism, in Saint Kitts & Nevis, but you can’t do it here.

  I do not appreciate your threat to sue me in London. The reason you are doing it is not because ‘most of your business is there’. Most of your business comes from shady people in Russia and the Middle East, with the occasional Vietnamese MP thrown in.

  The reason you are threatening to sue me in London is because you imagine that I am somebody from the sticks who is frightened of the words ‘London’, ‘UK courts’, and ‘high costs’.

  I would be fascinated to see the adverse publicity surrounding any court case in which your shady outfit goes after a blogger in the EU member state where you are abusively selling Maltese citizenship – the fact that you have an agreement with a corrupt government does not make it non-abusive – against the will of the people who hold a Maltese passport by birthright.

  Henley & Partners must be the most unpopular outfit in Malta right now after Pilatus Bank – an outfit owned by somebody who bought a Saint Kitts & Nevis passport from you – and that other outfit run by Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri, with whom you signed an agreement decided upon before they came to power.

  I trust you have some understanding of the low regard in which Henley & Partners is held by the real citizens of Malta, and I await your reassurance that you are not bankrolling Muscat’s outfit in this electoral campaign so as to ensure that he is returned to power and you can carry on selling the passports of my country. Daphne Caruana Galizia.

  On the last day of May 2017 Daphne got hold of – incredibly – an email exchange between prime minister Joseph Muscat, his chief of staff Keith Schembri, and Christian Kälin who, for once, was not sending ‘invisible emails’.

  Guns blazing, she emailed PM Muscat, Schembri, and Kälin. They will not have liked what she wrote:

  Sirs,

  I have in my possession evidence, in the form of email exchanges between the addressees of this message, that Henley & Partners’ threat/decision to sue me in the UK courts was taken on instruction from, and in collusion with you, the Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, his chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and the Justice Minister, Owen Bonnici.

  Following a meeting on the subject with the Justice Minister, Christian Kälin, who is group chairman of Henley & Partners, outlined a plan under which letters designed to intimidate with the threat of a financially ruinous and extremely cumbersome law suit in the ‘UK courts’ were to be sent to me, to the Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi, and to ‘three media houses’ in an attempt at dissuading us from further scrutiny of Henley & Partners and its opaque and damaging activities in Malta.

  This plan was then put past you, the Justice Minister, and you, Jonathan Cardona, CEO of Malta’s Sale of Citizenship Scheme, for your approval. It was also forwarded to you, the Prime Minister and to you, Keith Schembri, in tandem, and Henley & Partners’ group chairman addresses you by your first names: ‘Keith, Joseph’, in that order.

  You, the Prime Minister, reply: ‘i don’t object’ (sic) and you, Keith Schembri, reply: ‘Thanks, Chris. This looks good. Very kind regards’.

  At some point, you dropped the decision to threaten and intimidate the ‘three media houses’ and Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi, with a view to focusing solely on me with a barrage of letters and emails from Mishcon de Reya, a respectable law firm with a reputation to protect, who may be unaware that they are being used as a tool to affect the corrupt plans of the Prime Minister of a European Union member state against a journalist who he has marked out as his own personal enemy, and who he wishes to ruin financially because he cannot do so in other ways …

  At the most basic level, it is beyond belief that the Prime Minister of a European Union member state – as distinct from Henley & Partners’ favourite stomping-ground, Saint Kitts & Nevis – would allow himself to be addressed in this overly familiar fashion by the chairman of a corporation that has come to Malta to sell European Union Schengen Zone passports through a convenient arrangement with yourselves, to the detriment of other EU member states and with damaging consequences for Malta itself, or that he would allow himself to be addressed by that chairman in the same bracket as his own supposed underling and chief of staff, with his chief of staff even taking precedence: ‘Keith, Joseph’.

  It is just as disgusting that you, the Prime Minist
er of my country, stoops so low as to enter into collusion with a corporation chairman, showing him that you deliberately and maliciously use an @josephmuscat.com address for ‘official’ business rather than your @gov.mt address, and that you have drawn your Justice Minister and the CEO of Malta’s Sale of Citizenship Scheme (your former ‘Sherpa’) into collusion to do likewise, along with your chief of staff Schembri who you clearly treat as a business equal if not actually a superior to whom you concede.

  In other words, you, the Prime Minister of Malta, have no problem at all showing a corporation chairman that you are deliberately and maliciously choosing ways and means to cheat the public you have been elected to serve, and to hide information from the civil service, and that you so lack the dignity of the office you hold, that you draw the corporation chairman with multiple passports into this plot to hoodwink your own government and people.

  I know that this email will be ignored by you, the Prime Minister, by you, his chief of staff (you have already barred my telephone number), by you, the Justice Minister and also by you, the CEO of Malta’s Sale of Citizenship Scheme (who brazenly and disgracefully uses the email address jonathan@josephmuscat.com). But I shall still ask the question as to why you are colluding with Henley & Partners using @josephmuscat.com addresses hosted on a private server in the United States, rather than your official @gov.mt addresses hosted on the Malta government’s servers.

  This particular question is addressed to Christian Kälin, group chairman of Henley & Partners: Why, despite the fact that you are here operating in a European Union member state and not in the Caribbean islands of Saint Kitts & Nevis, you have agreed to collude with the Prime Minister, his chief of staff, another senior cabinet minister and the head of Malta’s Sale of Citizenship Scheme using @josephmuscat.com addresses, when you know – because you operate extensively in corrupt and undemocratic jurisdictions – that the sole purpose of this is to keep the exchanges from being part of official government records as they should be.

  As I myself said to you, Mr Kälin, during our sole meeting some weeks ago: ‘The fact that you deal with shady members of the Malta government and may have been exposed to corrupt dealings at an official level here in Malta does not change the fact that Malta is nonetheless a European Union member state and not a dirt-poor and desperate Caribbean island without the rule of law or institutions to safeguard it.’

  I should add here that, this morning at the Courts of Justice, I informed the inquiring magistrate in the Egrant Inc/Pilatus Bank inquiry that the Prime Minister, his chief of staff, the Justice Minister, the chief of Malta’s Sale of Citizenship Scheme and other key henchmen are all using firstname@josephmuscat.com addresses for their illicit exchanges concerning Henley & Partners, which would indicate that they are doing the same in their other (nefarious) plots.

  I also suggested that he should act immediately to gain investigatory access to the josephmuscat.com email server as he will probably find many of the answers he is looking for there.

  Meanwhile, a word of advice to the addressees of this email message: if you are going to take the trouble to creep around using @josephmuscat.com addresses to hide your dealings from the public and the civil service, it’s a good idea to make sure that you don’t automatically pick up your correspondent’s @gov.mt address by default when you type in his name, as that will send the entire chain of emails to the Malta government server. Daphne Caruana Galizia

  Daphne was killed six months later on 16 October.

  One consequence of her murder is that it put the good work of Anthony Julius, a trustee on the board of English PEN, which campaigns to defend writers and freedom of speech, into the shade. Julius is a libel specialist at Mishcon de Reya, the fancy law firm hired by Henley & Partners to shield the force of Daphne’s attacks on them. Daphne’s family asked English PEN to remove Julius. English PEN decided to retain Julius.

  The Caruana Galizia family said they were hurt by that decision. They went as far as asking English PEN to stop participating in campaigns supporting the cause for truth and justice in Daphne’s case. Matthew Caruana Galizia said ‘the shock and disgust with which journalists and writers all over the world reacted to English PEN’s decision is something that’s surprised even me. We all feel as though the organisation has abandoned the defence of free expression to serve as a platform for Mischon de Reya.’

  National chapters of PEN are self-governing and separate. PEN International continues to campaign for truth and justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia.

  A second consequence was that Henley & Partners went the extra mile to improve its public image. To that end, in April 2018, they booked Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja to sing at a Henley & Partners event in the City of London. Christian Kälin was at one point on the platform too. During the day, when The Spectator’s Freddy Gray popped up and started asking inconvenient questions, Gray was asked to leave the event.

  Later that evening prime minister Joseph Muscat arrived to hear not the fat lady but the not thin man sing. On the street was a small, noisy but very peaceful group of protesters, among them Paul Caruana Galizia, Daphne’s youngest lad. Co-author John Sweeney, then working for BBC Newsnight, tried to doorstep Muscat. He asked: “Prime minister, do you stand by your economy minister, Chris Cardona?”

  A security guard thumped Sweeney for his impertinence.

  There is, of course, no suggestion that Christian Kälin or his associates in Henley & Partners had any hand in Daphne’s killing.

  BANKING FOR BAKU

  In December 2014 Joseph Muscat led a funny peculiar delegation to Baku in Azerbaijan. Official trips overseas by Malta’s prime minister are traditionally well covered by the local media. The government pays for the journalists’ travel costs to make sure they’re on the front line taking good photos of ‘Joseph Muscat with …’

  But not on this trip.

  Nor did the government’s Department of Information provide any information.

  Daphne would find some details on the Azerbaijani government website.

  Joseph Muscat’s delegation was composed of himself and three other people: Keith Schembri, Konrad Mizzi, and his press secretary Kurt Farrugia. No ambassadors, no civil servants, no note-takers, no press.

  In the photos they sit facing the fabulously corrupt President Ilham Aliyev flanked by his entourage of a dozen big shots and hangers-on.

  In April 2015 it was time for a second funny peculiar trip to Azerbaijan. Joseph Muscat had heeded the press’s bewilderment that they had been left out of the visit last time. So his office paid for a small press pool to cover his second trip to Baku in four months. The editor of the national broadcaster TVM was invited with a camera crew and a photographer from the Department of Information.

  Two years later, in 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia learned what happened that day:

  In April two years ago, the Prime Minister travelled to Azerbaijan for a meeting with Ilham Aliyev, accompanied by Kurt Farrugia and Konrad Mizzi.

  Reno Bugeja, head of news at the public service broadcaster, TVM, was supposed to accompany them, along with a cameraman and a photographer from the government’s Department of Information. The DOI was supposed to obtain visas for Azerbaijan for the three men, but told them it hadn’t managed to do so and that they should leave Malta on their (transit) flight to Paris all the same and wait there for the visas.

  The two men from TVM and the DOI photographer ended up stranded in Paris for 24 hours. Reno Bugeja was furious. During those 24 hours, the Department of Information did not take their calls and Kurt Farrugia, the head of government communications, didn’t answer his phone either.

  When they were finally told that the visas had come through, they left Paris for Ukraine, en route to Baku. They landed in Baku late at night and immediately tried to contact the Department of Information in Malta, or Kurt Farrugia in Azerbaijan, for directions on what to do and where to go.

  The three men from TVM and the DOI, who were there at the government of Malta’
s behest, spent three hours at Baku airport ringing Kurt Farrugia and getting no reply, and eventually left and went to a hotel.

  When they finally got through to Farrugia, he told them that it didn’t matter that they had missed Joseph Muscat’s meeting with Ilham Aliyev, which is what they thought they were supposed to be there for. They were astonished. Shouldn’t the head of government communications have been freaking out that they missed photographing and filming such a high-level meeting?

  They realised that they hadn’t been wanted at the meeting and that the visas fiasco and failure to answer phones was just a ruse to hold them off while at the same time pretending – after the accusations the previous December that Muscat, Mizzi, Farrugia, and Schembri had gone to Baku without the media – that this time, the media had been invited, albeit only TVM.

  Instead, TVM and the photographer from the DOI found that they had gone to all that trouble and travelled all that way just for a meeting of old ex-leaders of dodgy countries, who Ilham Aliyev had invited to Baku to show how democratic he is. This was a far cry from the meeting about oil and gas which they had been led to expect.

  Joseph Muscat liked having his chats with Ilham Aliyev away from prying eyes.

  In 2016, Maria Efimova’s husband, a Cypriot, attended a job interview at a bank in Malta called Pilatus. The couple had moved to Malta from Ireland with their two infant children and were trying their luck settling down on the island. The interview was arranged by a recruitment agency next door to the bank.

  When he visited the ‘bank’, it was not quite what he expected. There were no cashiers, no customer waiting area, not even a sign on the door saying ‘bank’. It was an office with a handful of people in a posh building that housed several embassies of European countries including the UK, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Portugal.