Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  So one has to search for other, different explanations for the known facts. One would be that the owner of the casino deliberately looked the other way, that a man ‘known to the police’ who was unemployed was spending close to half-a-million euro on a casino. That would suggest money-laundering on a massive scale. Or, a second possibility, that the gambling was a cloak and that all or much of the money was actually payment for service or services to Alfred Degiorgio. A third possibility marries one and two: that Alfred was both money-laundering and being paid off.

  We wrote to Mr Fenech and a lawyer on his behalf replied denying any wrongdoing. The lawyer suggested that the authors may be implying that Mr Fenech and his company, the Tumas Group, had ‘some form of association in illicit activity by the Tumas Group with third parties.’ Mr Fenech’s lawyer continued:

  Any statement, suggestions, and/or insinuation to that effect is entirely baseless, gratuitous, and speculative and is herewith rejected in the strongest manner possible as totally unfounded both in fact and at law.

  The authors wrote back asking Mr Fenech’s lawyer to explain why the casino allowed an unemployed man to walk out with €444,000 from his Portomaso casino, whether the casino tried to investigate the provenance of the money he walked into the casino with, and whether, in fact, the money was in reality a cloak for a payment from Mr Fenech to Mr Degiorgio.

  The lawyer replied:

  We refer you to the evidence tendered by a representative of the casinos operated by Tumas Group in July 2018 in the ongoing proceedings before the criminal court against Alfred Degiorgio and others relating to money laundering charges, which evidence had clearly established that Alfred Degiorgio’s last visit to the said casinos goes back to 2012 in the case of one casino and 2013 in the case of the second casino. Consequently, the inferences and insinuations made in your last paragraph are so spurious, false, and contrived that they do not merit any consideration whatsoever.

  The full set of communications from Mr Fenech’s lawyers is shown in the annex to this book.

  The four- or five-year gap in time between Alfred Degiorgio’s last swing at the Portomaso roulette and the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia would, on the face of it, discount the possibility that Alfred Degiorgio was being compensated for his alleged involvement in that murder through cash collected from the casino.

  But that time gap does not dilute the evidence that suggests that Yorgen Fenech’s casino was willing to allow an unemployed person to wager close to half-a-million euro and walk away with most of it. That suggests there was or there had been a relationship between the two. Nothing more.

  Once again, Alfred Degiorgio, his brother George Degiorgio, and Yorgen Fenech, in fact all concerned, deny any wrongdoing.

  ROBBING LIBYA

  Forty-eight hours after the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, Catania law enforcement arrested a Maltese citizen on fuel smuggling charges. His name was Darren Debono.

  Even before his arrest, Darren Debono was well-known in Malta. He had a great run with Malta’s national football team and was a star of the Valletta Football Club. He also operated a restaurant on the Valletta waterfront, “Scoglitti”, across from the Sliema ferry terminal. His restaurant was a favourite haunt of Malta’s upper crust: ministers, MPs, professionals, bankers, iGaming executives. (Co-author Manuel Delia also ate there a few times.)

  But Darren Debono’s wealth was not made from footballing or catering. His money came from the sea and it was not caught in fishing nets. Not anymore, anyway.

  Darren Debono went into the fishing business around the turn of the century. He started with a fleet of five boats – four trawlers and a service boat – berthed at Malta’s fishing harbour of Marsaxlokk. He must have quickly realised that it takes a long time to become rich from fishing. Even if you go into business with the Sicilian fisheries Mafia of Acireale, which Darren Debono did.

  As luck would have it – if luck is the right word – Mu’ammar Ghaddafi was shot after being dragged out of hiding in 2011. Libya fell into the abyss of an unending civil war and out of the chaos came Darren Debono’s opportunity.

  Debono crossed paths with a Libyan militiaman, Fahmi Ben Khalifa. He was the smuggling king of Zuwara, a north-eastern Libyan city and clearing house for the trafficking of two commodities: humans and fuel.

  People were smuggled through Zuwara on their way to the Italian coast. Some 30% to 40% of the fuel pumped out of the refineries of the old Jamahiriya was siphoned through the same route.

  Ben Khalifa and his militia’s job was to oversee the security of the Zuwara refineries. That placed them in the best position to rob them. All they needed was an organisation that could transport the diesel to the buyers. Darren Debono’s fleet fitted the bill.

  Debono abandoned the fishing business and crammed his boats with fuel drums. Business was good. In no time his fleet grew to include two 60-metre fuel tankers – Basbosa Star and Sea Master X – big enough to increase volumes but still small enough to anchor at Hurd’s Bank, the shallow bank 16 miles south-east of Malta where fuel coming from Libya is then pumped ship-to-ship onto the buyers’ tankers.

  But, without the proper certification, fuel drums on a fishing boat could very well be stolen goods. They’d never make it through customs. Enter another Maltese citizen: Gordon Debono, unrelated to Darren but with whom he shared more than a surname. They both loved a quick buck. He owned or controlled at least 20 companies with businesses ranging from real estate to yachting and motoring. But, more pertinently, he also owned a fuel trading company – Petroplus Ltd – that agreed to launder Darren Debono’s smuggled fuel with some elegantly forged certificates.

  Darren Debono and Ben Khalifa now had paperwork that said the Libyan fuel they were transporting was actually from Saudi Arabia, which, of course, it was not.

  In Malta that sort of conjuring trick is child’s play. Even beach pebbles had realised that a considerable chunk of the island’s fishing fleet had switched from fish to fuel. And even beach pebbles preferred to look away.

  If the paperwork looks right, no one, it seems, will ask questions.

  Six kilometres from Valletta, at the office of the Libyan-Maltese Chamber of Commerce, it was possible to regularise anything exported from Libya to Malta on the back of a simple self-declaration of the points of origin and destination. It did not matter if your declaration was true or false; it was not the Chamber’s job to check your claim. That was the arrangement designed by the Maltese authorities. The opportunity for misuse was glaring.

  Job done. Fuel smuggled from Zuwara could now be transported with documents saying it came from Saudi Arabia and from Hurd’s Bank it would be taken to Sicilian or Turkish harbours where it would be sold for stratospheric profits.

  On the back of a single Italian buyer, the gang made €26 million in profits.

  The fleet grew again. The Vassilios XXI, the Santa Pawlina, the Portoria, and the Haci Telli were added to this new maritime empire. In 2016, at the peak of the Debonos’ and Ben Khalifa’s huge swindle, they bought the Temeteron, an enormous oil tanker 110 metres long.

  Gordon Debono purchased the Temeteron in partnership with Roderick Grech, another Maltese trader, who in the past had acquired experience in trafficking between grey Turkish, Russian, and Libyan markets.

  But by the time the Temeteron joined the fleet, business had dried up. The partners fell out: Darren Debono and Ben Khalifa on one side, Gordon Debono and Roderick Grech on the other.

  By autumn 2017 investigators in the Catania police and the Italian economic crimes agency had cracked the racket and both Debonos and Ben Khalifa ended up in handcuffs.

  Darren Debono’s arrest in Italy so soon after Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder created more than a little confusion. Not least because the government spokespeople that handled the tsunami of requests for information from press from all over the world, particularly the Italian press, hinted that Daphne’s death was related to fuel sm
uggling.

  Daphne had written about fuel smuggling. She had written about a whole lot more, but fuel smuggling was one way to distract journalists and prevent them from going down much more politically inconvenient paths. One would assume there would be some political fall-out from the assassination of a journalist in a democratic country. But if the murder could be pinned on some criminal conspiracy, politicians could avoid the heat.

  There were two ‘bases’ for the PL government’s spin. The first was that Daphne’s killing was Mafia-style: a car bomb like all the ones used to kill or maim fuel smugglers with outstanding debts. The second was that preliminary analyses showed that the explosive used in Bidnija was likely Libyan army issue.

  The past is the mirror for the present, they argued.

  1 June 2014: Darren Degabriele was killed by a car bomb, detonated while he drove from Marsaxlokk to Żejtun.

  16 June 2016: Martin Cachia was killed on the spot when a bomb exploded inside the Alfa Romeo he was driving to Marsaskala.

  26 September 2016: A bomb studded with screws and ball-bearings exploded inside a van on Triq Aldo Moro in Marsa, seriously injuring its driver Josef Cassar.

  31 October 2016: John Camilleri, known as Ġanni tas-Sapun, was killed when his Mitsubishi Pajero exploded in Triq Paderborn in San Pawl il-Baħar.

  20 February 2017: Romeo Bone lost both legs in an explosion on Triq Marina in Msida.

  29 June 2017: A car driven by Victor Calleja known as iċ-Ċippu, was blown up in Marsa.

  The arrest of Darren Debono. Daphne. Maltese fuel smuggling of Libyan oil. From the web of possible motives, a single thread was pulled, leading public impression down a path it would have found difficult to imagine otherwise. There are very few degrees of separation between the underworld and above ground in Malta.

  To realise just how short the chain is, here is an excerpt from Daphne’s blog posted on 31 October 2016:

  A man – John Camilleri, 67, known as Giovanni tas-Sapun, of St Paul’s Bay – has been killed in a car-bomb explosion in Buġibba. I woke to the sound of sirens blasting down Burmarrad hill and they didn’t stop for half-an-hour. A major traffic accident perhaps, but there hasn’t been one on that stretch of road for years, not since it was remade.

  And then the news: another bomb in another car and another man dead. And I thought, there goes another diesel smuggler. Because the discernible pattern in criminal assassinations over the last few years in Malta is that diesel smugglers are blown up by bombs in their cars, and drug smugglers are shot dead by hired hitmen.

  And everybody pretends there’s no pattern. The diesel smugglers are described as ‘fishermen’ or ‘restaurateurs’, and the drug smugglers are called long-distance lorry drivers or hauliers, or ‘unemployed family men’ or ‘businessmen’, though some of them are occasionally described as ‘known to the police’.

  There was one exception, last month: a haulier who was blown up by a car bomb rather than shot. But then the bomb was different to the ones used for diesel smugglers: it was packed with tacks, nails, and ball-bearings and didn’t kill him, but led to his legs being amputated.

  Today’s dead man, too, is a ‘businessman’ who is ‘known to the police’. The legitimate side of his business is tiles and bathroom fittings.

  The National Statistics Office, in figures released five days ago, says that it calculates ‘prostitution and illegal drugs’ as making for €17.1 million of Malta’s gross domestic product last year. Quite frankly, I think that’s a conservative estimate.

  Shortly after she published her post, there was a reaction. Daphne received a call with more information. She posted again:

  This morning when I woke to the news that another man has been blown up by a bomb in his car, I wrote about an emerging pattern in which diesel-smugglers are blown up by bombs in their car while drug-traffickers are shot by hit-men.

  There was one exception, last month, I wrote, a haulier who was blown up by a car bomb rather than shot. But then the bomb was different to the ones used for diesel smugglers: it was packed with tacks, nails, and ball-bearings and didn’t kill him, but led to his legs being amputated. But I’ve now discovered that it was not an exception at all.

  I am informed that the man in question, Josef Cassar, was also a diesel smuggler, and that he is linked to the MV Silverking, a vessel owned by Silver King Ltd, whose only shareholders are Pierre Darmanin, black sheep of the well-respected Tan-Niksu family of Żurrieq, and his estranged wife Annabelle. The vessel was impounded by Customs three years ago and Darmanin was named in a police/customs investigation into a diesel-smuggling ring. Darmanin, who owns Darmanin Fisheries Ltd, had left his family for the Labour Party’s Equal Opportunities Officer, Rachel Tua, and fathered a child by her.

  When Martin Cachia, a notorious criminal and diesel-smuggler, was blown up by a bomb in his car last January, Malta Today reported that it had seen a letter, signed by Pierre Darmanin and dated only four weeks earlier, asking ‘an unspecified recipient to permit Cachia to travel with him to Egypt’.

  UPDATE/Pierre Darmanin has now contacted this website to say that his company has sold the MV Silverking when it was released from impound three years ago, but he doesn’t remember to whom he sold it, though he thinks it was to a company owned by a certain Tony. He says that he was not charged with diesel-smuggling (he was investigated). When asked about his written request that Martin Cachia, who was murdered four weeks later, travel with him to Egypt, Darmanin said: ‘My signature was forged. Martin used to do things like that.’ When asked why a diesel-smuggler forging a travel request would pick out his name of all people’s, Darmanin said: ‘Those of us who own ships (vapuri) all know each other.’

  Smuggling diesel from Libya to Malta and Italy is a highly lucrative trade organised by networks of criminals in all three countries.

  Officially Pierre Darmanin is a tuna fisherman. As Daphne wrote in her blog, he may have been suspected of smuggling but, if true, he has dodged the consequences. A boat he owns, the Crystal Starlight, was once impounded for cigarette smuggling. Nothing came of that either.

  Co-author Manuel Delia briefly met Pierre Darmanin on a few occasions, a few years before Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed. Delia was a PN candidate in the constituency of Żurrieq in the 2013 elections. Darmanin lives in Żurrieq and attended a few public events held for that constituency campaign.

  In December 2017, a few days after the suspected assassins were arrested in a hut on the Marsa waterfront, Manuel Delia visited the site of the arrest with a TV crew.

  There he came across Pierre Darmanin who asked him to ensure the crew did not film him or his boats as any association with the arrests of the Degiorgios could damage his business.

  Pierre Darmanin also told Manuel Delia he believed that one of the three suspects charged with Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder had had nothing to do with the case. He did not specify which one. Asked how he could be privy to such information, Pierre Darmanin again attributed his supposed knowledge to being plugged into the waterfront boat-owners network.

  How could Pierre Darmanin rule out the responsibility of one of the three charged with Daphne’s murder? The Degiorgios and Vincent Muscat deny killing Daphne. But the evidence pointing to their involvement in the murder is compelling. Does Darmanin perhaps know more about what the Degiorgios were doing? One thing is certain. Since the Degiorgios have been locked up, there have been no more explosions on the island. There have been attempted car bombs but none of them were successful.

  Pending trials in Sicily, Darren Debono is back in circulation in Malta. A former football star who spent some time locked up for a multi-million euro smuggling racket cannot hide for long in an island of Malta’s size. Which is why Darren Debono deals with that problem by staying firmly in plain sight. He is back on the football scene as a manager and has opened high-profile court cases against Malta’s government to stop them taking away his money.

  The Maltese authorities have asked the United Nation
s Security Council to issue sanctions against the Debonos and Ben Khalifa to get a hold on their profits from their smuggling years. That action has followed the initiative of the US who have blacklisted Darren Debono and marked his restaurant business for sanctions.

  In court, Darren Debono’s lawyers said US embassy staff asked him to give them information on Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri in exchange for easing their sanctions. They also said Darren Debono fobbed off the Americans by telling them he would never spy on his prime minister.

  A rare joint statement by the governments of the US and Malta dismissed the claim.

  But interestingly, Darren Debono’s lawyers did not say their client had nothing on Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri. Rather, he implied that whatever he had on them he would not be telling the Americans.

  Perhaps that was a message to Malta’s prime minister and his chief of staff right there. Or perhaps not.

  That is not all. A year after Daphne was killed, the murder investigation found that around the same time he called Daphne Caruana Galizia, Pierre Darmanin also called Alfred Degiorgio and Chris Cardona.

  Was that a coincidence? Perhaps it was. Or perhaps not.

  SEX, LIES, AND BURNER PHONES

  On 30 January 2017, Daphne was having dinner with her stoic husband Peter. A gentle and thoughtful lawyer who loved his wife deeply, he felt that for the past few years Daphne’s blog, Running Commentary, had taken over both their lives. She could not properly relax when on holiday, she could not go out very often because she was so dedicated to the blog. Every now and then he chided her over her obsession with documenting the latest horrors of her island home. He was worried about the personal price she was paying: the risks, the threats, the hours and hours spent on the blog, the loss of normal life.

  That evening was unforgettable because she received a text message and their dinner was ruined. She gobbled up her food as fast as she could and the couple headed home, where Daphne hit the keyboard running.