Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  Latvia’s financial intelligence unit looked at the transactions in and out of ABLV. Documents published by MEP Ana Gomes showed Malta’s FIAU asked for information from their Latvian counterparts about this transaction between ABLV and 17 Black. The Latvians provided the Malta police with information in response. The content of that information remains unknown.

  The sequel to the question ‘Who owns Egrant?’ was ‘Who owns 17 Black?’

  The answer to the question would explain why an Azerbaijani national was using a money-laundering engine in Latvia to deposit so much money in a Dubai shell company that, as far as could be determined, did nothing at all, although it also accepted fat payments from a company acting as an intermediary for the purchase of a gas tanker.

  In November 2018, the question would be answered. Stephen Grey and Tom Arnold for Reuters and the Daphne Project published a story that named the owner of 17 Black as Yorgen Fenech.

  To recap, Yorgen Fenech is one of Malta’s richest men. He is one of the owners of the Electrogas Consortium. He is CEO of GEM Holdings that owns a third of the Electrogas Consortium. He also owns 9.1% of GEM Holdings. He is CEO of the Tumas Group that owns a third of GEM Holdings that owns a third of Electrogas.

  Yorgen Fenech is the third boss of the Tumas Fenech family business founded by his grandfather. The business has investments in casinos, property, hotels, entertainment. In Malta, they have fingers in lots of pies. Yorgen Fenech’s rise to power was, people say, at the expense of his cousins who felt they could no longer work with him. The word on the island is that he had something of a Napoleon complex about him. No one is quite sure how much Yorgen Fenech is worth. He’s certainly a multi-millionaire and may indeed be a billionaire. After the cousins left the business, they carved out their share of their grandfather’s legacy and are now competing with Yorgen Fenech and the Fenech brand.

  The Electrogas deal was sealed by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri. Secret paperwork for Mizzi’s Panama shell company, Hearnville, and Schembri’s Tillgate, identified 17 Black as the ‘target client’ that would pay millions into their accounts.

  The estimated figure that 17 Black and Macbridge – whose true owner is still unknown – would pay Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi’s companies was $2 million.

  The circle was complete.

  Yorgen Fenech personally retained approximately a tenth of the local holding in Electrogas. Why so? Could this tenth actually be destined for someone else, person or persons unknown, outside the consortium? Could it possibly be a continuing bribe? No one knows for sure, but the circumstances are such that the questions hang in the air.

  Yorgen Fenech has not denied owning 17 Black. He has not explained why he owns it or what the company does.

  The rest of the Tumas Fenech directors and all the other Maltese families holding shares in Electrogas distanced themselves from 17 Black. All shareholders of Electrogas insist they have been contracted to provide energy to Malta on the merits of their bid and not because of corruption. They deny any wrongdoing.

  Electrogas denies any wrongdoing.

  Yorgen Fenech denies any wrongdoing.

  Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi deny any wrongdoing.

  A magisterial inquiry continues.

  THE MYSTERY PROFESSOR

  There is a photograph of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Joseph Mifsud together. One is a fraud, a cheat, a conman and almost certainly a Russian stooge. The other is a mystery professor from Malta.

  All good jokes – and the above is obviously a joke – bite into the apple of truth. Joseph Mifsud was a dodgy academic, originally from Malta, and an associate of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

  That does not make Joseph Mifsud a suspect in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. No one in this chapter seems directly connected to the murder itself.

  But Joseph Mifsud sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Joseph Muscat on the eve of the 2013 election, at a time when Muscat’s governing plan for the following years was clearly set out. But behind the scenes other planning was also being carried out. That work likely included Pilatus Bank. It almost certainly included Henley & Partners. It would include the money laundering services for the Azerbaijani ‘royal family’. It would include EU citizenship for dozens of Russian oligarchs in Vladimir Putin’s sphere.

  Joseph Mifsud came to the world’s attention because he was allegedly used as a Russian asset serving Vladimir Putin’s interests in the west. Then he disappeared.

  Why him?

  Mifsud conned five universities something rotten and then ended up at a tiny university in Rome with extraordinarily close links to Moscow’s biggest spy factory. In Rome in March 2016, he met a bit-player on Team Trump, George Papadopoulos. The next month they met again in London where Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a young Russian woman he called ‘Putin’s niece’. At the meeting he offered the man from Team Trump ‘the dirt’ – thousands of emails belonging to Team Hillary Clinton. The emails had been hacked by the Russians. The Democrats only became aware that they had been hacked in June 2016, so Mifsud was touting the stolen goods two months before the victims realised they had been robbed.

  Funnily enough in that very same month, April 2016, Mifsud had been in Moscow. He appeared on a guest panel with a big Kremlin player and a German millionaire based in Switzerland who once bought a British nuclear company and then suggested that the British nuclear engineer at its heart go to Moscow on an all-expenses paid trip for a conference.

  Before his disappearance Mifsud was the networker par excellence. He had been snapped with everyone who is anyone: Boris Johnson, Joseph Muscat, the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, and even the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

  Somehow, Mifsud managed to leverage his career from being a dodgy academic into becoming a figure in an extraordinary story of espionage. He boasted to his Ukrainian girlfriend Anna that ‘I have dinner with Lavrov tonight. Lavrov is my friend. Lavrov this, Lavrov that,’ she told Alberto Nardelli of BuzzFeed News.

  In November 2017, the investigation by FBI special counsel Robert Mueller set out the evidence against Papadopoulos and Mifsud’s name emerged as the go-between for the Russian hackers. When cornered by a reporter from La Repubblica, Mifsud denied any contact with the Russian government, saying: ‘I am an academic, I do not even speak Russian.’ Immediately after that interview, Mifsud disappeared, with the American government and the Italian state hunting him.

  The Democratic National Committee sued the professor, their lawsuit stating that he ‘is missing and may be deceased’.

  Only, Mifsud did not vanish. Where he ended up over the next six months is an extraordinary story and one which is deeply disturbing for anyone who cares about how Europe deals with the threat from the secretive Russian state.

  There’s an old KGB handbook which details the tricks Russian intelligence got up to in the bad old days of the Cold War. The gossip is that these techniques are still very much in use. Lesson One, roughly translated, goes like this: ‘When targeting the enemy, don’t use a Russian if you can find someone from a third country who will do your dirty work for you.’ That seems to have been what happened with the vanishing professor.

  Joseph Mifsud was born in Malta in 1960 and grew up and attended university on the island. He also studied at the University of Padua in Italy before going on to Queen’s University Belfast where in 1995 he completed a PhD in comparative education. He returned to Malta where, according to his online biography, he became chief advisor to the ministry of education. He claims to have served as Malta’s representative to the Council of Europe in education and at Unesco. He taught at the University of Malta and married another Maltese academic with whom he had a daughter. The couple are now divorced.

  Daphne’s son, Matthew had sat through a lecture by Mifsud in 2006: ‘bluster and bollocks from start to finish’ – proof, if proof were needed, that Matthew is a chip off the old block. Mifsud resigned from the University of Malta in 2007 ‘under
something of a cloud’ – a phrase that crops up again and again in this story.

  In 2008 Mifsud became the head of the private office of Malta’s foreign minister but he stayed for only a few months. Throughout his life, he appears to have been rather good at blagging his way into a job but piss-poor when it came to doing it. ‘He exaggerates,’ according to a former foreign ministry colleague, ‘there’s a lot of big talk … but he didn’t deliver.’

  Many of the academics Mifsud has worked with in recent years are under the false impression that Mifsud was a diplomat. There is even a photograph of him speaking at an event with ‘Ambassador Mifsud’ on his nameplate. But one senior figure who worked with Mifsud at the foreign ministry is clear that he was never an ambassador. Maltese journalist Jurgen Balzan told co-author John Sweeney: ‘There’s absolutely no evidence of Mifsud being an ambassador or deployed in some Maltese foreign ministry office abroad.’

  However, by the mid-2000s, Mifsud did have a network of international contacts and he was particularly well-connected in the nascent states of the former Yugoslavia. He became a close friend of Miomir Žužul, Croatia’s ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 2000. Žužul is a practising Roman Catholic, a knight of the Order of Malta, and now lives in Georgetown. The relationship between Mifsud and Žužul has endured. The two men go on holiday together in Europe every summer and are so close that it is apparently inconceivable that Mifsud would visit DC without hooking up with Žužul.

  In 2008, after leaving the Maltese foreign ministry ‘under something of a cloud’ Mifsud became the president of a university at Agrigento in Sicily. A decade on, he was tried in absentia for fiddling the books by hiking pay for some of his colleagues and fined €49,500. Having left Agrigento ‘under something of a cloud’ he was appointed head of a new ‘University of the Eastern Mediterranean’ or EMUNI in the Slovenian coastal town of Piran. It’s around this time that the ambassador who never was started calling himself ‘Professor’.

  EMUNI was never a proper university but flogged itself as a centre for students from Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant to study for short periods, the money coming from the Slovenian government and a small number of feeder universities. In 2008/09 EMUNI had no students and no faculty. That’s a bit of a clue, some say. Its sole activity was to host a short summer school for 20 visiting Tunisians.

  To make EMUNI look busier than it actually was, Mifsud allegedly cooked the books, regularly preparing false paperwork to conceal the truth about the university’s lack of activity. The image of an EU success story was created and some fell for it. Greek MEP Rodi Kratsa visited and was genuinely impressed.

  ‘Mifsud is very clever on one side but very dumb in other ways,’ according to someone who saw him in action in Slovenia. A source says that Mifsud tried to get EMUNI to pay for his apartment, dinners, and car hire. But the Slovenian public sector has strict rules which restrict the payment of personal expenses. Mifsud left ‘under something of a cloud’ in 2013, accused of owing €39,332 in wrongly-claimed expenses and excess mobile phone charges. To this day the full story of EMUNI has never been told. ‘Nobody in Slovenia talks about this,’ says a source with knowledge of Mifsud’s fraud.

  That year he popped up in Malta again, holding a joint press conference with Malta’s coming man Joseph Muscat, a few days before the election that would make Muscat prime minister. The two men were toasting the success of a new academic initiative which would see thousands of students come to Malta from abroad. Nothing ever came of this initiative. More interestingly, the brand new prime minister also got to meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, very early on in his tenure: possible fruit of Mifsud’s work behind the scenes? It’s hard to know.

  What is clear is that when Mifsud realised his days at EMUNI were numbered, he called an old friend in London, Nabil Ayad, for a job. Ayad was closely connected to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and director of the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD) which he had founded in 1978 and was then part of the University of Westminster. Its students were generally low-order dips from the naffer embassies, seeking to touch up their CVs. Ayad appointed Mifsud director of international studies.

  In 2009, Ayad took the LAD brand with him to a joint venture by the University of East Anglia and an educational company, INTO, run by a British man called Andrew Colin out of a Brighton office. Five years later, UEA dumped LAD. It moved on to Stirling University in Scotland. The hook-up cost Stirling a small fortune.

  In September 2014, ‘Professor’ Mifsud organised a three-day trip to Stirling, attended by a group of diplomats from African, Caribbean and other non-G20 countries, plus some of LAD’s visiting fellows, including lawyer Dr Stephan Roh – an exotic German-born, Swiss-based millionaire, with a Russian wife, of which more anon. There was a series of lectures and seminars, lots of networking, and a gala dinner. There was something funny peculiar about the bunfight according to one academic who attended. Dr Andrew Glencross said: ‘I smelt a rat. There was champagne and everything …’

  Is there normally champagne at events in Stirling, asked co-author John Sweeney?

  ‘No, not at all,’ replied Glencross bleakly.

  After the bunfight, the hook-up between the London Academy of Diplomacy and the University of Stirling started to unravel. Mifsud lacked the skills to manage people and the administrative staff were tense around him. LAD failed to attract students from foreign embassies under Mifsud. By the end of 2014, the student body was mostly Chinese, with one source saying that Chinese students numbered as many as 90%. One professor expressed doubt that many of the Chinese students could understand what was said in seminars because their English was so poor. Concerns were raised with both Mifsud and some of the Stirling academics about the quality of students but nobody seemed to be bothered.

  Nobody mistook Mifsud for a serious academic. ‘He’s more of an educational entrepreneur,’ said one of the LAD’s former academics. ‘Mifsud is part of a massive network of academics and semi-academics who all do favours for each other. There’s a lot of back-scratching. It’s not corrupt, just normal academic networking but on steroids.’

  Mifsud’s appearance was scruffy, his tone self-important. ‘He was one of these people wearing 10-year-old suits but carrying himself like an important person,’ according to one academic. He was constantly name-dropping and promising to link people up with others who could help them. But senior academics at Stirling were starting to tire of his big talk and lack of delivery.

  LAD became run-down and chaotic. Several visiting lecturers from the Mifsud era complain about not being paid for work done. Academics from Stirling say that nothing much came of the LAD relationship after the initial three-day trip and a couple of big dinners hosted in London with ‘C-class ambassadors’. The leadership at Stirling were beginning to suspect that they had been conned. Mifsud’s success at pulling the wool over the eyes of academics in Malta, Sicily, Slovenia, East Anglia, and Scotland shows that very clever people can also be bloody fools.

  In mid-November 2014, Mifsud visited Washington DC where he delivered a lecture at the American University on the topic of ‘Diplomacy and Development in a Global Environment’, sponsored by AU’s Program on International Organizations, Law, and Diplomacy in collaboration with the Organization of American States. He also gave an interview to journalist Larry Luxner for an article in The Washington Diplomat. If the Russians were watching out for someone they might be able to use, Mifsud was popping up in all the right places.

  From 2015, Mifsud’s operational base moved to Rome. He reportedly bought a stake in what was the old Italian campus of the University of Malta, renamed the Link Campus University and established the Rome Academy of Diplomacy – a chip off the London Academy of Diplomacy. Link Campus University appeared on the surface to be a credible institution, having respectable names on its advisory board including a magistrate well known for prosecuting corruption cases. It had a beautiful building but hardly any students:
300, if that. There were rumours that the institution was dodgy and secretly linked to Russians. Mifsud was part of the senior management at Link Campus University. When money troubles surfaced, Stephan Roh bought a stake in Link via Drake Global Limited, his UK-registered company.

  The inner circle at the top of Link Campus University featured Italians with important political and security connections. The biggest security fish was Vincenzo Scotti, the president of the university, and Italy’s minister of the interior from 1990-92, then minister of foreign affairs. Link also boasted Pasquale Russo, who is the president of the Consortium for Research on Intelligence and Security Services, and Professor Franco Frattini, a former foreign affairs minister under Silvio Berlusconi who is rumoured to be close to the Kremlin.

  Link Campus is where, in 2018, Luigi di Maio, then Italian deputy prime minister presented the foreign policy programme of the Five Star Movement. Italy’s former Minister of Defence Elisabetta Trenta and Deputy Foreign Minister Emanuela Del Re were both members of the faculty before they rocketed to power. And it is where, on 14 March 2016, Mifsud and Papadopoulos met for the first time.

  Mifsud had been working at Link, schmoozing, building up contacts with Colonel Ghaddafi’s people in Libya. On Mifsud’s watch there was, according to a former Link academic, an attempt to promote Dr Roh as an academic figure ‘which is ridiculous’. At least one academic was under pressure to book him as a speaker at an academic conference. One of Roh’s employees – a French guy based in Monte Carlo – was given a platform as an expert. The Roh employee told an academic that Roh’s firm specialised in due diligence and anti-money laundering. According to the former Link academic, Roh speaks Russian. While Mifsud was a very open person, Roh was much more guarded. Some of the academics were worried that the university was being turned into a centre for Russian soft power. There is a photograph of Mifsud at the Link Campus surrounded by young Russian women from a Moscow university. In the photo, Mifsud is smiling like a wolf.