Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

The interviewer seemed more interested in learning about his family, questions he had thought were just the warm-up phase. He said his wife was still looking for work. She spoke English fluently and had had some training in banking and anti-money laundering procedures.

  The interviewer, Hamidreza Ghanbari, an Iranian national sporting a Dominican passport and CEO of Pilatus Bank, did not appear too keen on the gentleman in front of him. But he told him the chairman was looking for a personal assistant. The bank, he explained, was only just being set up and since it was a very small operation, onboarding new clients was often handled by the main man himself. These were special clients, ultra-wealthy, ultra-demanding. Their banker’s personal assistant could be no ordinary secretary.

  Maria Efimova’s husband left the interview thinking he did not stand much chance of getting a job. His wife, however, who hadn’t even been trying, looked set to be earning their keep quicker. He went home to tell her that a banker working in Ta’ Xbiex wanted to interview her for the job of his assistant.

  His name was Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad.

  At the time, Ali Sadr was 33 years old. He was originally a native of Iran but by then held a portfolio of passports which allowed him to dodge international sanctions against his country of origin and its citizens.

  He had no training as a banker. He graduated in civil engineering from Cornell University and had been living in the US for 10 years with his mother and sister. In a 2003 court filing he claimed that, if he were ever to return to Iran, his life would be in danger, because his father, who still lived in Iran, was in trouble with the regime. Or so Ali Sadr claimed.

  That claim does not check out. Ali Sadr’s father, Mohammad Sadr Hashemi, was at the time one of the wealthiest men in Iran and was decorated by the presidency of Mohammad Khatami as a national hero for being one of the ‘great exporters’ of the Islamic Republic.

  Ali Sadr obtained a US green card in 2004 based on his application for asylum in the United States.

  In short order, the asylum seeker ostensibly escaping from the country in which his father was an enormously successful businessman established himself rather well. He registered multiple companies in Malta, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Cyprus, the UK, and the US. He procured properties in Maryland, Washington DC, and Malibu. He even acquired a pistachio farm in California, as you do.

  His official US residency opened doors to acquisitions in that country. But his Iranian citizenship would still have proven a barrier to conducting business in several countries. That barrier was removed by Henley & Partners who supplied Ali Sadr with at least one fresh Caribbean passport. Or two.

  Writing in The Malta Independent on the eve of the June 2017 election Daphne Caruana Galizia reported that she had confirmed with Christian Kälin that Ali Sadr was a Henley & Partners client.

  In the UK registry, Companies House, Ali Sadr appears as a director of two companies. In both cases he is listed as a citizen of Saint Kitts but has two different dates of birth. There is a remote possibility that there exist two Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejads from Saint Kitts and Nevis who both registered companies in the UK but given that the population of that country is less than 60,000 this is not likely.

  The existence of the relationship between Ali Sadr and Christian Kälin has been confirmed by Kälin himself. In response to questions from The Shift News, Kälin part-confirmed a Daphne story that Ali Sadr had been invited to be a guest at a wedding anniversary party hosted by Mr and Mrs Kälin.

  As a matter of courtesy … [Ali] Sadr was indeed invited to Kälin’s wedding anniversary event, which was one of many social events that Kälin regularly hosts, and to which a large number of people are invited, including current and former clients … [Ali] Sadr did not attend this event, Henley & Partners told The Shift News.

  The existence of a relationship between Ali Sadr, Joseph Muscat, and Keith Schembri was revealed through Ali Sadr’s wedding guest list. Photographs taken at his 2015 wedding in Florence show the Muscats and Keith Schembri with the owner of Pilatus Bank in the kind of chummy snaps you would take with old friends.

  Since Malta is a member of the EU and the eurozone, a banking license granted by the Maltese authorities is in effect a European banking license. That made Ali Sadr’s acquisition all the more valuable.

  Ali Sadr started exploring Malta as base for his bank before the 2013 elections, when the Nationalists were still in power. He met the then finance minister who encouraged him to explore Malta as a business location. But his application would need to be assessed by the regulatory authorities.

  Ali Sadr applied for a banking licence after the 2013 election. He instructed his staff not to mention his Iranian nationality in any communication. This was revealed in emails exhibited as evidence before the US courts.

  ‘No one should mention any ties from me to Iran. This is only to own Pilatus and the bank in Malta.’ He wrote that email as he worked to set up the bank accounts needed to show Maltese authorities he had the necessary funds to run a bank. The US authorities would later describe those funds as ‘proceeds of crime’.

  By January 2014, the license to set up Pilatus Bank was granted.

  Unlike her husband, Maria Efimova was not an EU national. Though she was entitled to work in Malta as the spouse of an EU national, as a Russian citizen she needed to get a work permit before she could secure employment. Local work permit rules do not allow a job-seeker to apply independently for a permit. An application can only be filed by an employer.

  Maria Efimova was offered the job of personal assistant to Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad and was asked to start the next day. But the engagement would have to be informal while the bank’s application for her work permit was processed. Since the outcome of the process was a foregone conclusion in view of her eligibility, it was safe for her to start working.

  But it would not be right for her to be paid before she had been formally registered.

  Apart from a work permit, Maria Efimova was also waiting for her residence permit to be approved. While her application was being considered, she could not leave the country and leave her husband behind as travelling alone she would likely not have been allowed back into Malta on her return. An issue arose when Ali Sadr needed Maria Efimova to travel for work. She told him she could only travel with her husband while her residence permit application was pending. And the children would have to travel with them as there was no one they could leave them with.

  Maria Efimova says Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad agreed. She made the booking and went on the trip.

  Three months working at Pilatus Bank gave Maria Efimova a clear idea of what was going on. It did not seem quite right.

  The bank was barely interested in the infinitesimal Maltese market. But there were two Maltese names she did recognise.

  One was that of John Dalli. The notorious former EU commissioner held an account with a few hundred euro, but as far as she could see it was inactive.

  The other Maltese name was Keith Schembri. The name did not mean anything to her. She would later learn that the name and the account belonged to the most senior adviser of Malta’s prime minister.

  But her attention was drawn to more significant customers with names she would recognise with her moderate familiarity with the Russian news media.

  Pilatus Bank held no more than 180 accounts. It was not too hard to remember the ones which provided the highest contribution to the multi-billion value of the bank’s deposits.

  The bank was primarily a clearing house for the scions of Azerbaijan’s ruling elite.

  The children of the fabulously corrupt Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and minister for emergencies Kamaladdin Heydarov funnelled hundreds of millions of euro through Pilatus Bank using it to launder funds and purchase properties outside their country.

  The game here is hiding the true source of the money. If a president’s daughter openly buys a house in, say, London then the world will know about it very quickly. But if the president’s daughter uses private banks, shell compa
nies, and other vehicles in offshore jurisdictions to hide her identity, it is much harder to know the true source of the cash. The files in Pilatus Bank documented the payments processed for these secret acquisitions.

  Being inside Pilatus Bank meant being one of a handful of trusted people who knew what the Aliyevs and the Heydarovs were hiding: the fact that they were the mystery buyers of fabulous wealth. They needed to hide their identity because being the heir to a minister, or even a president, could not easily explain the hundreds of millions of euro they held. The money was likely the product of corruption or misappropriated from the people of Azerbaijan.

  The ‘heirs’ of this monarchy in all but name owned massive conglomerates in their own country, hotels and luxury properties in Dubai, porcelain and linen factories in France, villas in Spain, and developments in Georgia.

  Though the Azerbaijanis were not the only customers of Pilatus Bank, they were the ones with the most money. From the inside, it looked as if Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad was developing a boutique business as a banker for elite dictators and their families.

  One other name was José Eduardo Paulino dos Santos, the 32-year-old son of the dictator of Angola. Old Man Santos was also staggeringly corrupt and had ruled oil-rich Angola with an iron fist longer than his son had been alive.

  Perhaps the first abbreviation you learn on an anti-money laundering course is PEP: politically exposed person.

  When a banker is faced by a customer who is a politician or a holder of some other public office such as a judge, they need to watch out. Someone trusted with public office who goes rotten and takes bribes or embezzles money by virtue of their office will need a bank to take their money. A banker who takes the proceeds of crime is party to money-laundering.

  It is not enough to watch out for the politician. You need to keep an eye on their spouses, children, and trusted others.

  Therefore, in theory, it is harder for a politician to open a bank account. They are asked to provide more information about how they obtained their money. And if they cannot explain every cent, most banks would turn the PEP down, declining their business.

  Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi knew something of that problem. The Panama Papers show that their dodgy companies Hearnville and Tillgate went around the world tryng to find a bank which would take their money. As far as is known, the effort was unsuccessful.

  Pilatus Bank was very accommodating to those who knew of its existence.

  Maria Efimova could think of half-a-dozen laws and banking rules being broken every time an eminent PEP became a client of the bank. For the PEPs, it was as easy as buying a piggy bank from a toy shop.

  She made her thoughts known, particularly to the bank’s compliance manager Claude-Anne Sant Fournier with whom she had become friendly. In an office of 10 people, courtesy and familiarity would naturally bring the staff together. Sant Fournier trusted Efimova enough to ask her to babysit her child.

  Efimova told Sant Fournier she was not comfortable with the bank accepting millions from clients no bank should accept.

  Sant Fournier knew her stuff. Before working at Pilatus Bank, she was a specialist consultant on compliance and anti-money laundering at one of the big four consultancy firms: KPMG.

  Her last client at KPMG was Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad. She helped handle his application for a banking licence and, when he got it, she switched sides and became her former client’s head of legal and compliance.

  Three months into her job, Maria Efimova saw investigators for Malta’s financial intelligence agency, the FIAU, barge into Pilatus bank for a ‘routine inspection’. There was no way in hell that some of the files handled by the bank where she worked would pass even the most accommodating and cursory inspection. Files of politically exposed persons lacked the most basic checks and there were documented transactions that would have raised the suspicion of an infant. But they had been processed by the bank without the slightest question.

  Claude-Anne Sant Fournier was not looking forward to answering uncomfortable questions from the FIAU. In her position, the law enforcers would expect her to bear the responsibility. She understood she needed to dodge the heat.

  While the investigators waited in the lobby, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad and Claude-Anne Sant Fournier hid in his office and tried to send Maria Efimova to deal with the investigators.

  Maria Efimova refused. She had warned them their processes were not compliant and she didn’t think it was fair to be made to carry the can.

  Ali Sadr told Maria Efimova to leave and never come back. She had been his assistant for three months and had not yet been paid.

  Maria Efimova was an angry woman. She felt she had been used. The least the bank could do, if Ali Sadr wanted to fire her, was pay her for her work. Instead she found herself broke, unemployed, and without an explanation she could give any subsequent employer as to why her job at the bank had not ended well.

  After making enquiries, she filed a complaint at the Department of Industrial and Employment Relations, the government office generally known as the ‘labour office’. They heard her case and wrote to Pilatus Bank telling them that, unless they paid Maria Efimova for the time she worked there, they would proceed to take legal action.

  The bank did not pay and the government office took the bank to court.

  Ali Sadr retaliated by going to the police and accusing Maria Efimova of defrauding his bank. He claimed she had bought flights for her family on the company credit card without authorisation. The flights cost less than €2,000. Maria Efimova had no paperwork to show she had booked the tickets on the express instructions of her boss. Instead she looked like she had taken her kids on a joy ride at the company’s expense.

  The police arrested Maria Efimova, handcuffed her, and held her in a cell for 12 hours. The next day they charged her with fraud. In a later complaint, she said the police had treated her roughly. The police questioned her in front of Ghanbari and Sant Fournier, humiliating her and calling her a thief in front of her alleged victims. Maria Efimova says the police also ignored her pleas for water. She said in her complaint she was pregnant at the time but hadn’t told the police. Soon after she miscarried.

  Once she was charged, she was released on bail until her case could be heard. Her passport was retained by the authorities to stop her from absconding.

  The officer charging her was Jonathan Ferris, a police inspector in the economic crimes unit. He would later have to answer questions in an internal inquiry looking into Maria Efimova’s claim that she had been mistreated. He denied her accusations.

  The evidence Pilatus Bank had given Ferris clearly showed that Maria Efimova purchased tickets in her name and the names of her children and charged them to the bank’s account. The case against her seemed solid and it did not surprise him that she might try to get out of trouble by lashing out at the police.

  Out on bail, charged with fraud, her passport withheld, Maria Efimova was unemployed, unemployable, and trapped in Malta. While she desperately tried to find a way out, her mother in Russia died. When she asked for permission to go to her mother’s funeral, it was refused.

  She had heard of Daphne Caruana Galizia and her blog Running Commentary. In October 2016, she wrote Daphne a letter telling her about Pilatus Bank, what the bank had been up to, and what had happened to her at the bank and at the hands of the Maltese police.

  Daphne did not reply immediately.

  Four months later she did. In February 2017, Daphne got in touch with Maria Efimova and told her she wanted to meet her. The journalist visited the whistleblower at her modest apartment. Speaking to co-author Manuel Delia after Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed, Maria Efimova said that it was clear to her that there was not much she had told Daphne about what was going on at Pilatus Bank that Daphne did not already know.

  Daphne must have had another source either from within Pilatus Bank or someone who was aware of the findings of the preliminary investigations into the bank conducted by the FIAU, the same investigations th
at had led to Maria Efimova being fired.

  In February 2017 Daphne published a series of articles about Pilatus Bank, how its Iranian owner had somehow obtained a licence to run a European bank without so much as a day’s banking experience and how Keith Schembri and John Dalli both banked at Pilatus, although Dalli’s assets at the bank appeared to be negligible.

  Daphne reported how fabulously wealthy PEPs who could not deposit money at an ordinary high-street bank without having to answer questions funnelled their cash through Pilatus Bank. And she reported how documents held at the bank showed what was happening with that money, what it was being spent on, how it was being laundered.

  Maria Efimova says Daphne then showed her copies of a set of documents and asked if she had ever seen them. Efimova said yes. The documents had been stored in a lockable filing cabinet or safe in the bank’s office kitchenette. The location was significant because privacy laws do not allow office managers to set up CCTV cameras in staff recreational areas. Whatever was stored in the office kitchenette was meant to be kept away from the bank’s CCTV cameras.

  When Maria Efimova confirmed the authenticity of the documents, Running Commentary ran the most important and most read story in its nine-year history.

  The owner of Egrant, the third Panama shell company everyone had been asking about, had been found, the story went. It was Michelle Muscat, wife of Malta’s prime minister Joseph Muscat.

  From Daphne’s blog, published on 20 April 2017:

  In the kitchen at the offices of Pilatus Bank in Ta’ Xbiex, there is a safe in which certain files are kept, and also particular documents marked for extreme secrecy. The safe used to be in the bank CEO’s office, but for some reason was moved to the kitchen.

  In this safe, documents are held pertaining to Russian clients of the bank, and to Maltese PEPs, including John Dalli, consultant to Prime Minister Muscat, and Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, both of whom have accounts with the bank in their own personal names.

  Dalli’s account is not used much, but the Prime Minister’s chief of staff uses his regularly and his statements show highly suspicious transactions involving people in Azerbaijan. This bank account is separate to the one held in the name of his once-secret Panama company, Tillgate Inc.