Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  The evidence suggests that Mifsud had first gone to Moscow in 2010 or even earlier. In 2012, the London Academy of Diplomacy hooked up with the Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Faculty of Global Processes. An advert said that the faculty was a stepping stone for graduates to work ‘in the Russian government, the presidential administration, federal ministries and agencies, the special services’. Bit of a clue? Lomonosov University is a spy factory. Mifsud has boasted that he once met Vladimir Putin himself, but with a track record as rickety as Mifsud’s, you have to doubt his word. The Kremlin deny it, but they would, wouldn’t they?

  The website of the Russian embassy in London shows that in April 2014 Mifsudattended the Global University Summit in Moscow and in May 2014 he met the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko to present his views ‘on the results of the Global University Summit’.

  They also ‘discussed different issues of the Russian-British cooperation in the sphere of international relations, diplomacy, science and education’. On 10 July 2014, according to the Russian embassy website, the counsellor of the Russian embassy Ernest Chernukhin visited LAD with a delegation from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. They discussed the collaboration between the faculty of global processes of MSU and the London Academy of Diplomacy.

  After Mifsud met Papadopoulos at Link University in Rome in March 2016, they met again in London the following month.

  We have some sight of how Mifsud operated around that time from an extraordinary source, Simona Mangiante, an Italian woman who became Papadopoulos’ girlfriend. Mangiante accepted a post working for Mifsud in London in the autumn of 2016 at the London Centre of International Law Practice or LCILP. The LCILP had all the hallmarks of a Mifsud operation: very grand-sounding name, no substance, no real business.

  Mangiante suggested that Mifsud, in a manner of speaking, played cupid. She says that Papadopoulos, who also worked at the centre, got in touch with her via social media and asked her out.

  The centre’s office was in a smart Georgian terrace close to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. But it was tiny. Mangiante and her colleagues perched around a single table. They used their own laptops. The place was ‘very messy’, Mangiante told The Guardian.

  It felt like something was weird. I never met any Russians there … But the centre certainly wasn’t what it pretended to be. He is sneaky, someone you can’t read. He was vague about everything. He wouldn’t answer questions directly. I could never understand what was behind it.

  The centre seemed ‘fake’, ‘artificial’. ‘I didn’t smell a culture of academia’, she told The Guardian. And she was not being paid – another classic Mifsud tell. When she complained about not getting any money from Mifsud, he replied via his Stirling University email, writing in Italian: ‘Dear Simona, I hope you are fine … I was in Moscow … Now I’m in London. Can we meet in person? I’m here until Tuesday night. A hug. J’

  The meeting never happened and Mangiante quit herpost there after three months, in November 2016.

  In November 2017 Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements about contacts he had had with the Russian government and admitted to the FBI that a mystery Maltese professor was his go-between with the Russians. The go-between was Mifsud. In the Mueller report, the US special investigation found that Mifsud ‘maintained various Russian contacts while living in London’ including an unnamed person who was a former member of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm based in Saint Petersburg.

  One former visiting professor from LAD who knew Mifsud well says that if he was involved in helping the Russians interfere in the US election, ‘then it will not be out of naivety. He is cunning.’ Mifsud was, the academic says, part of a ‘third-rate diplomatic community where there is an element of braggadocio’. So maybe he exaggerated his closeness to Russia to impress Papadopoulos. ‘But it’s clear that Mifsud knew something before the world did. And that raises questions.’

  John Schindler, former member of the US National Security Agency told co-author Sweeney: ‘the Russians will use third-country nationals as access agents, to use the proper term, meaning they’re out there spotting and assessing for targets for Russian intelligence, particularly people who might not want to talk to a Russian or would be put off by talking to a Russian for security or personal reasons. Someone who’s a third-country national can be a lot better person to be the face of Russian intelligence.’

  So why would a minor Maltese academic, working chiefly in British and Italian universities, be of interest to the Russians? Schindler said:

  He is a very typical kind of character in this world, on the fringes of academia, think tankery, and governments. He looks non-threatening. He’s a hanger-on, he’s at all the parties, he’s a wannabe, not a real player. In a strange way that could actually help the Russians because the threat perception drops considerably. He’s Maltese which is not associated a lot with threats of any kind, frankly. He can get along in a lot of places.

  In May 2017 Mifsud chaired a session at a conference in Saudi Arabia to coincide with US President Donald Trump’s visit. Trump didn’t attend the conference but Ashcroft Carter, former defense secretary was there. Speakers included former MI6 head of counter terrorism Richard Barrett. The conference was organised by an influential Saudi think-tank called the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. Based in Riyadh, its president is Prince Turki Al Faisal, a former Saudi ambassador to the UK and a former head of Saudi intelligence.

  Mifsud had told the management that he could help them get a high placing in an international league table of think-tanks. Concerns were expressed about Mifsud to the think-tank’s management and whether they had considered that he might be a spy trying to get close to Prince Turki. But Mifsud was apparently so influential with the think-tank’s management that they arranged for him to have a special visa which allowed him to travel in and out of Saudi Arabia freely. Some of the researchers at the think-tank had doubts about Mifsud’s value and credentials – and, without reference to the management, they removed Mifsud from the security conference programme. When the management of the think-tank became aware that Mifsud had been excluded from the programme, they insisted that all the glossy brochures for the event were pulped, that Mifsud should be reinstated, and that a new set of brochures printed.

  In May 2017 Stirling University made an honest man of Mifsud by appointing him as ‘a full-time Professorial Teaching Fellow in the University’s Politics department’. There’s no denying the benefits of networking.

  Here’s another nugget from that old KGB handbook – international conferences and seminars are great for recruiting. Stuffed with clever academics, scientists, and business people, they’re the perfect place to ‘get information and influence foreigners’.

  The very same month that Mifsud tipped off the man from Team Trump about the dirt on Hillary – April 2016 – the professor had been in Moscow for a Kremlin-backed Valdai conference. It’s a talkfest for Kremlin trustees and useful idiots from the West who like the idea of rubbing shoulders with Vladimir Putin and chums. In one photograph to Mifsud’s left is Ivan Timofeev, who works at a think-tank linked to the Russian ministry of foreign affairs. The Washington Post has reported that email correspondence suggests that Mifsud put the Trump team in contact with Timofeev. Also at that same Valdai conference was Dr Stephan Roh, the Swiss-based entrepreneur who had been on the jolly to Stirling University.

  With Mifsud and Papadopoulos, Dr Roh is, you could say, the third man. He and his Russian-born wife Olga have homes in Switzerland, Monaco, London, and Hong Kong. And then there’s a castle in Scotland. Buying it made Stephan and Olga the Baron and Baroness of Inchdrewer.

  In 2014 Stephan Roh had become a visiting lecturer at the London Academy of Diplomacy. A very wealthy man, he invested in Link University in Rome where Mifsud was part of the management. And Mifsud became a consultant at Roh’s legal firm. Mifsud and Roh did the Valdai event in April 2016. On 12 May 2017 Mif
sud and Roh appeared together in Moscow at the Russian International Affairs Council to launch an energy report they had worked on together. There’s a clip of Mifsud talking about the report which can be summed up in Matthew Caruana Galizia’s phrase: ‘bluster and bollocks from start to finish’.

  And Olga Roh was on Fox TV’s ‘Meet The Russians’. The TV show has Olga relaxing in her posh home, saying: ‘The way we always were in my family, very achievements orientated.’

  When co-author Sweeney made a BBC Newsnight film about George Papadopoulos, Mifsud, and Roh in 2018, Olga was running an upmarket dress shop in London’s Mayfair. Among her customers was Britain’s then prime minister, Theresa May. There is a photograph of prime minister May meeting the Queen in an Olga Roh coat. The shop has since closed.

  Most intriguingly are Stephan’s business interests, which appear extensive. Newsnight revealed the story of one. Sweeney and his team tracked down a British nuclear engineer, Dr John Harbottle who had his own nuclear consultancy firm. He told the BBC:

  In the autumn of 2005, I received a phone call from a Dr Stephan Roh, showing an interest in the company and explained very briefly that he intended to be involved with some technology transfer from Russia to Europe and he would like to do this through my company.

  Dr Harbottle’s company, Severnvale Nuclear Services Ltd, specialised in the effects of radiation on fuel materials in reactors in Britain, France, and the United States. So what did Dr Roh want from him?

  Harbottle said:

  He explained that he would like to acquire my company but he wanted to retain my services on the technical side because he was a lawyer and had no technical background at all.

  Dr Roh bought the nuclear consultancy, then invited Dr Harbottle on an all-expenses paid trip to a conference in Moscow. But the nuclear scientist was alert to the danger that visitors to Moscow can be targeted or even honey-trapped into compromising situations. Dr Harbottle told the BBC: ‘We smelt a rat. It didn’t sound as if it would ring true and I decided that I wasn’t going to go to this meeting.’

  So Dr Harbottle declined to go. Shortly afterwards, he was fired.

  Under Dr Harbottle the company’s turnover had been £42,000 a year. Within three years under Dr Roh, Severnvale Nuclear was turning over more than $43 million a year, with just two employees.

  Bob Shaw, weapons and intelligence expert, told co-author Sweeney:

  On the face of it, it could be a legitimate business, highly successful in a short space of time. However, my concerns are that it has only got two employees, neither of which are experts in the field of consultancy. So it could be money laundering, up from that it could be a way of obtaining nuclear capability for the Russian energy sector within Russia.

  Dr Roh co-authored a book, The Faking of RUSSIA-GATE: The Papadopoulos Case. The book sets out the case that Mifsud was not a Russian spy but ‘deeply embedded in the network of Western Intelligence Services.’ Papadopoulos, too, is a ‘western intelligence operative’, the authors assert, who was ‘placed’ in the Trump campaign by the FBI. There is no evidence for this Kremlin-friendly claptrap. The Faking of Russia-Gate is a bit rubbish, frankly.

  The case of Joseph Mifsud and Team Hillary’s emails and Stephan Roh and Severnvale Nuclear raises big questions about these types of international characters and their links to Russia.

  When the scandal broke, Mifsud denied that he was a spy. When approached by Italian newspaper La Repubblica in November 2017 he said: ‘Secret agent! I never got a penny from the Russians: my conscience is clean.’

  And then the man with the clean conscience vanished, as is his custom, under something of a cloud.

  The Italian newspaper Il Foglio discovered that, while the whole world was looking for him, including private detectives working for the Democratic National Committee and the Italian courts for the €49,500 he had embezzled from the university in Sicily, he was holed up in a flat paid by Link University. Il Foglio reported: ‘The house where Mifsud hid is in via Cimarosa 3, behind Villa Borghese.’

  The house was within spitting distance of the Russian embassy.

  Fancy that.

  THE OPPOSITION LEADER WHO WON’T OPPOSE

  When Joseph Muscat contested a general election in 2013 for the first time, the Nationalist Party (PN) he opposed had been in government for most of the previous 25 years. The PN had had two party leaders for almost his entire lifetime. Eddie Fenech Adami became PN leader in 1977 and prime minister ten years after that. He ruled until his retirement from politics in 2004, with a 22-month break when Labour’s Alfred Sant won the 1996 election but lost the government in a crisis before its mid-term.

  In 2004 the PN elected Lawrence Gonzi who defeated Alfred Sant in 2008 but lost to Joseph Muscat in 2013. It was, by any measure, time for change.

  The PN’s last term in government was unpopular. It was perceived as tired and arrogant and by the end it could do no right.

  Lawrence Gonzi tendered his resignation from the leadership of the PN immediately the election result became known. He was, however, sworn in as leader of the opposition and stayed on as party leader until a new leader was appointed.

  His replacement was Simon Busuttil, who had spearheaded the EU information office in the run up to the EU referendum campaign and is widely credited with helping the Yes vote to win 54% of the vote.

  Simon Busuttil had been a member of the European Parliament for nine years (2004-13) when he was called upon by the prime minister to return to Malta and serve as deputy PN leader in a desperate bid to rejuvenate the party ahead of the 2013 election.

  Daphne Caruana Galizia’s initial opinion of Simon Busuttil as party leader:

  Simon Busuttil was a fabulous MEP, but, so far, he is really not shaping up as a natural-born leader. As an MEP your job is to be factual and dispassionate. As a leader, you need passion and conviction, because without them you can’t motivate people.

  Put simply, you can’t lead with the outlook, attitude, and comportment of an accountant or lawyer. Leadership is about MORAL pronouncements, about reminding people where their priorities should lie, about giving a human dimension to the nuts and bolts of bald issues.

  But first, you have to be able to recognise those issues. A political leader must have a nose for issues in the same way that journalists must have a nose for a story.

  She was particularly annoyed with Simon Busuttil’s initially tepid reaction to Joseph Muscat’s decision to ‘push back’ migrants saved from the sea through forced repatriation:

  And now we have Busuttil’s latest bit of absolutely hopeless moral and political leadership. ‘Ridiculously inadequate’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Faced with public outrage at the push-back of immigrants who will be flown out by Air Malta at midnight and 4am tonight, he says, clinically, that ‘this is a very worrying situation’ and he ‘expects the prime minister to honour all international obligations’.

  That’s just a part of it, Simon – what about his moral obligations towards the people involved?

  I quote Times of Malta: ‘Asked about an article he had written in 2010 about sending migrants back, Dr Busuttil said he was now opposed to push back because of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.’

  Again, unbelievable. He opposes push-back not because of the reasons the ECHR ruled against it (inhumane, exposing people to torture, mass deportation, violations), but because the ECHR ruled against it. This is like saying that you are opposed to murder because it is illegal.

  What Busuttil should have said is that he was wrong to support push-back, that he regrets that stance, and now understands the full horror of the implications for the individuals involved. And the fact that the ECHR ruled against it only serves to convince him further that it is immoral, only now we also know that it really is a violation of human rights.

  Simon Busuttil should be right out there calling a press conference and slamming the government and Muscat to hell for their behaviour. He should be calling them immoral,
racist, violators of human rights. Instead, what we have is a cold-fish approach by somebody who doesn’t understand the media and mass political communication at all. If he doesn’t shape up fast, he has created a vacancy already. Quite frankly, we barely even know he’s there.

  It is safe to say she was not a fan.

  In the four years between 2013 and 2017, however, Simon Busuttil would grow in stature.

  As more and more stories of corruption at the highest levels of power surfaced, the PN increased its focus on good governance, or better, the lack of it in Malta’s administration, and campaigned for the next election under the banner of Politika Onesta (Honest Politics).

  As government scandal followed government scandal, so did the outrage from the opposition. Simon Busuttil no longer waited for others to suggest he call a press conference to slam the government for their ethically objectionable failures.

  There were campaigns over the electricity deals, street marches protesting the Panama scandals, indignant calls for resignations over the Egrant revelations, and protests in support of Daphne Caruana Galizia when government minister Chris Cardona won a bid to freeze her bank accounts after she ran a series of embarrassing stories about him.

  Another sustained PN campaign was over the privatisation of three public hospitals in Malta, including the only hospital on the smaller inhabited island of Gozo.

  The PN had mild misgivings about the principle of hiving off a big chunk of the national health service. But it was angry about the fact that the hospitals were being transferred to unknown people with shareholding structures in offshore jurisdictions clearly designed to obscure who was making money from the deal.