Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  This is what she typed:

  Malta’s Minister for the Economy, Chris Cardona, is currently at a brothel in the German town of Velbert, near Düsseldorf. He is accompanied by another Maltese man, described as ‘short and bald’, who my source at the brothel was unable to identify.

  Daphne explained that Cardona was in the FKK Acapulco brothel and that its clients had to pay an €80 entry fee before going with the lady of their choice. Go to the FKK Acapulco website and you will see that it advertises itself as a ‘sauna club’, with services including stripteases, go-go girls, and ‘30 fully air-conditioned top suites’. The photographs on its site leave little to the imagination. It’s a knocking shop.

  Daphne’s source described Cardona emerging naked from the shower at around 8pm and barking out in Maltese: ‘Ħaqq Alla kemm hu kiesaħ l-ilma’ (“By God, the water’s cold”). To anyone who knows Chris Cardona, the vulgarity is authentic.

  The next morning at 10.27am Daphne was able to flesh out some more of the story she headlined BROTHELGATE:

  More details arrive from my source at the FKK Acapulco, a whorehouse in Velbert, a small town outside Duesseldorf, where events of interest took place last night … The Minister for the Economy and his friend got to the whorehouse at around 7pm. They had a sauna and a (cold) shower and then headed straight for the bar. They chose a prostitute and the Minister’s companion went into a room with her. After a while, the Minister for the Economy followed them into the same room for three-way sex and some voyeurism. They were at the whorehouse for three to four hours in total.

  At a quarter past noon, a fresh update: ‘Cardona’s naked prancing in a German brothel last night reveals him to have a tattoed shoulder.’ She added some more detail about his accomplice who she still had not properly identified: ‘This morning, this man’s Facebook page suddenly disappeared off-line and my calls to him on his mobile phone have gone unanswered. I have sent him a message, saying: “This is Daphne Caruana Galizia, trying to reach you for comment.” He has not rung or messaged back yet.’

  At 2.54pm she posted a screenshot of a press release from the government, denying her story: ‘The Minister for the Economy categorically denies allegations published in the blog of Daphne Caruana Galizia … this outright lie … Minister Cardona is currently in Germany to participate in the first Stake Holder Forum on the digitisation of European industry as a speaker on the invitation of the German Ministry for Economic Affairs.’

  She ran Cardona’s denial under the headline: ‘What is worse, that a government minister goes to a brothel while on official business in Germany, or that he lies about it?’

  That evening, at 7.10pm, there was more: ‘BROTHELGATE: Why is Chris Cardona in Germany?’ Daphne blogged:

  Chris Cardona is in Germany as a guest of the German government. He was invited as a guest speaker at a ‘Stakeholder Forum’ organised by the European Commission and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The conference is called Futurium: Implementing the Digitising European Industry Actions, and it is held in Essen today and tomorrow.

  Cardona, listed in the programme as ‘Dr Christian Cardona, Minister for the Economy, Investment, and Small Business, Malta’, was scheduled to give a 15-minute keynote speech at 2pm today, called Digitising European Industry: the View of the Maltese Presidency. The Economy Minister is accompanied by Joe Gerada, who has a law practice with former Labour Party television employees Charlon Gouder and Jonathan Attard. Gerada who worked at Malta Investment Management Co Ltd, the state corporation which manages state-owned companies and investments, is on secondment to the Economy Minister’s private secretariat, as a consultant.

  Essen, where the conference is being held, is just half an hour by car from Velbert, where FKK Acapulco, the brothel he visited, is located. Incidentally, FKK stands for Freikoerperkultur, which means ‘nudism’. FKK Acapulco means ‘Acapulco Nudie Club’.

  Daphne was like a machine. At 8.17pm she had confirmed, to her satisfaction, the identity of Cardona’s pal:

  The man with whom Economy Minister Chris Cardona spent several hours at a brothel in Velbert, Germany, last night is Joe Gerada, a lawyer who Cardona has put on the state payroll in his private secretariat as a ‘consultant’, and who has now been given the role and title of ‘policy coordinator for the EU presidency’…

  Joe Gerada took down his Facebook page early this morning, in what appears to be a self-protective move following the story I uploaded last night. I have been trying to ring him all day, but my calls and messages have gone unanswered. He has now barred my number so that my calls are automatically rejected.

  Gerada went to FKK Acapulco, a brothel, at around 7pm with the Economy Minister yesterday evening. The two took a sauna and shower, then went to the bar, where they negotiated with one of the prostitutes. Gerada went with her into a room, and after a couple more drinks at the bar, Cardona followed them in. They left at around 10.30pm.

  Later that evening a fresh astonishing development: ‘BREAKING BROTHELGATE: The Economy Minister and his consultant went to the same brothel again today.’ She blogged:

  The Minister for the Economy, Chris Cardona, accompanied by his consultant and ‘Malta EU Presidency policy coordinator’ Joe Gerada, went to the same brothel, FKK Acapulco, this afternoon that they went to last night. Cardona was scheduled to speak at a conference in Essen, as a guest of the German government, shortly after 2pm today. By 4pm he was at the brothel in Velbert, which is around half-an-hour away by car. On entering, Cardona called out to his consultant and policy coordinator, ‘Joe, Joe, minn hawn’ (‘Joe, Joe, this way’). The patron who went to the locker-room to message me about it at 4pm said they ‘looked jolly and rather pissed, like they came from a drunken lunch’. He asked me not to upload the information until he and his companion had left the place at 5pm, at which point Cardona and Gerada were still there. This means I have no information on what time the Minister and his consultant left the brothel today.

  Then Daphne added the following update:

  It’s just occurred to me that the Minister and his consultant wouldn’t have gone back for sex this afternoon, but for negotiation on making sure their backs are covered, given that the story had broken and the Minister had issued a press release of denial.

  That evening Daphne blogged that the opposition leader, Simon Busuttil, ‘has said, quite rightly, that the story about the Economy Minister and the Velbert brothel has left people shocked and disgusted. True, but I also hear a far more dangerous sound: the sound of loud, mocking, contemptuous laughter. Contempt spells the beginning of the end or the very end itself in any human relationship, including that between elector and elected.’

  At 11.03pm, her blog carried the headline: ‘The drunken idiot is going to sue me when he knows full well that he was at the brothel and that all my details were correct.’

  All three co-authors of this book have been threatened with libel many times and also sued for libel. None of us would have had the mad courage to react in this way. Daphne’s contempt for her adversaries takes one’s breath away.

  She wrote:

  The Minister for the Economy has said that he is going to sue me for libel. This is the standard response of the cornered Maltese politician, particularly in sex-and-corruption cases. And not just Maltese – think Jeffrey Archer, one of the most notorious cases in political history. Archer, too, sued a newspaper for libel for reporting that he went with a prostitute. He won half-a-million pounds in damages, bankrupted the newspaper, ruined the editor’s career – and was later imprisoned for four years for perjury, because he really had gone with the prostitute and lied about it under oath.

  Suing for libel, or just announcing that you are, is a way of dealing with the immediate pressure of public opinion and your political bosses. Sue for libel – and then we’ll see …

  These are the facts. The Minister for the Economy was at a brothel called FKK Acapulco in Velbert, 30 minutes from Essen, where he had been invited
to address a conference, between 7pm and around 10.30pm last night, accompanied by his ministerial consultant Joe Gerada. They had a sauna, then a shower, then they went to the bar where they negotiated with a prostitute. Gerada went into a room with the prostitute, and after a couple of drinks, Cardona followed. All three of them were in the room together.

  They were there at the same brothel again this afternoon at 4pm, but I don’t know what time they left because my source left before they did. Nor do I have any information on what they did there today, unlike yesterday night. I suspect it wasn’t sex but an attempt at getting hold of any video footage which will compromise them, and/or making sure that their backs are covered in other ways as journalists are now bound to start ringing for information.

  At 11.14pm she blogged: ‘Sadly for Chris Cardona, his consultant is the weakest link.’ Her story ran:

  The Minister for the Economy has been tweeting madly in between issuing press statements calling me ‘the queen of fake news’. Too bad for him that his aide, who was with him at the brothel, is the weakest link. Joe Gerada disabled his Facebook account early this morning, presumably immediately after reading my first ‘German brothel’ report. I hadn’t even mentioned him at that stage. I just wrote that the Minister was with a bald man who looks a lot like Neville Gafà, and that my source had in fact mistaken him for Gafà. Boom! Gerada’s Facebook page disappeared. He then spent the entire day not answering my calls or messages, and eventually set his phone to reject my number. Was that because he wasn’t at the brothel? No, it was because he was at the brothel.

  Her last blog of the day was to run a series of photographs with captions sent in by her readers, none of them complimentary to Chris Cardona.

  All concerned deny any wrongdoing. Neither Chris Cardona nor his aide, Joe Gerada, went to a brothel, they say.

  When the economy minister hit back, he hit back hard. He and his aide brought four libel suits against Daphne. The maximum penalty under Maltese law is €11,000. But for the first time in Maltese legal history, they applied for and got four seizure orders against her in advance of the cases being heard to the value of €44,000. Effectively, they froze Daphne’s bank account. She became reliant on her husband writing cheques for her. She would go to the bank roughly once a week and cash one of Peter’s cheques and that is where she was going when she was killed.

  But Daphne was no fool. She was confident that her source was telling her the truth. Her source was willing to testify in court if necessary but Daphne found a better way to get to the bottom of Brothelgate. The answer lay in an acronym, TAP, which stands for transferred account procedure.

  Daphne set out her magic trick in a post on 8 May 2017:

  The Minister for the Economy, Chris Cardona, this morning filed an objection – on the final day permissible at law – to my request to the Court for an order to the mobile telephony companies to preserve evidence showing, through his phone TAP records, where he was on the night of January 30. I know for a fact, because a man I know was right there at the same time and looking directly at Cardona and his person of trust Joe Gerada, that they were at the FKK Acapulco in Velbert, Germany. Cardona and his person of trust are claiming that they were in their hotel room and in the hotel neighbourhood. Cardona has also spoken about his proof that he was in the hotel: a minibar bill. If Cardona and Gerada really wanted to prove that they were not at the FKK Acapulco, but in the town where their hotel is located, then they would have no objection to an order by the Court for the preservation of their phone TAP records. On the contrary, they would welcome this creative and incontrovertible manner of proving their whereabouts. But they have objected. And they have done so because they were at the FKK Acapulco and are now trapped because they never anticipated that my defence team would think of using their phone TAP records to prove conclusively where they were that night.

  Phone TAPs do not mean phone tapping. This is the system that the mobile telephony companies use for billing you when you use your phone while you are away from Malta. When your phone is ‘roaming’, each time you make a call or send a text message, the system records exactly where you are, so as to be able to bill you. These records, which are available only to the phone companies, are accurate down to the street, and in some cases even the street corner. But they will only come into play if you use your phone. If the Minister for the Economy and his person of trust used their phones even once and incurred roaming charges while they were at the FKK Acapulco, the records would show they were in that location in Velbert. That is why they are objecting: they probably did use their phones, or can’t remember whether they did.

  Daphne applied to the court to get the phone TAP records of Chris Cardona which would pin-point his geo-location at the time to the brothel in Velbert – as her source asserted – or to the hotel room half-an-hour’s drive away in Essen which was where Cardona said he was that night. Cardona’s lawyers tried to knock that application out but failed. The phone company handed over the records in a sealed envelope but their contents could not be revealed until a witness from the company took the stand and that would only happen after the plaintiff had set out his case.

  By the time Daphne was murdered on 16 October the libel case had not been heard – only the legal argument over whether the court would get the phone TAP records. Shortly after she died, her husband and two of her sons, Matthew and Andrew, turned up in court to defend the libel suit. Remember, under Maltese law, death is no defence in a libel suit. But Chris Cardona did not turn up for this hearing or any other.

  In May 2018 Cardona failed to turn up yet again. Chris Cardona’s lawyer, Pawlu Lia, tried to fend off the consequences of that by complaining that not all respondents were attending court. Daphne’s husband, Peter, came to all court sittings in place of his wife. But his sons were working abroad. Pawlu Lia said he would ask the court to summarily close the case and award damages to his client. The lawyer for the Caruana Galizia family, Joseph Zammit Maempel would have none of that. He was reported in The Times of Malta as saying: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if the applicant were to stop playing hide-and-seek and just turn up in court to declare whether he ever left his hotel?’

  It was a good question. After some argy-bargy, the Caruana Galizia family lawyer requested the ‘liberatorja’. The Times of Malta reported that this is a procedure whereby if the plaintiff, in this case Dr Cardona, is a no-show then the defendant can strike out the case at the expense of the defaulting plaintiff. Later that year his aide, Joe Gerada, dropped his case.

  That suggests, of course, that Daphne’s story stands, that Malta’s economy minister did indeed go to a brothel in Germany and have a threesome while supposedly on official business.

  The real issue here is not that a government minister went to a brothel. Think of that what you will. But if Daphne’s story is right – and Chris Cardona’s behaviour in court after her request for TAP records strongly suggests it is – then for him to consider lying on oath is a very serious matter indeed. It would disqualify him from politics and lead to his disbarment.

  To understand the next phase of the story, it’s necessary to go back in time to a series of bank heists, taped phone calls, and a former Maltese copper who was in no sense a Dixon of Dock Green. David Gatt was kicked out of Malta’s police force in 2001 after former Police Commissioner George Grech asked then Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami to start proceedings before the public service commission.

  Gatt was accused of links to crime after his name popped up in taped phone calls during an investigation into the hold-up of a Group 4 security van in 2000. No criminal action was ever taken against him but he was dismissed and then proceeded to sue the police commissioner and prime minister for unfair dismissal.

  Transcripts of phone conversations which purported to reveal the familiarity between Gatt and the crooks allegedly responsible for the Group 4 heist were considered inadmissible in court because the police had not obtained warrants for the tapping operation.

  The Grou
p 4 heist led to the conviction of Alfred Degiorgio for armed robbery and handling stolen goods after his fingerprint was found on one of the bags of cash. In 2018, while in jail awaiting trial for the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Degiorgio was acquitted of the robbery on appeal.

  Meanwhile Gatt, who had since retrained as a lawyer, sought reinstatement into the police force in September 2010 but this was still being contested when, three months later, he found himself in bigger trouble.

  Gatt was charged with complicity in four armed robberies: the 2007 hold-up of the Balzan HSBC branch, in which around €1 million had been stolen, the attempted hold-up of a security van carrying €2.8 million in Santa Venera in 2010, another failed hold-up at HSBC’s Rużar Briffa Centre in Ħal Qormi that same year, and the attempted hold up of a jewellery shop in Ħ’Attard, also in 2010.

  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to be accused of complicity in one armed robbery may be regarded as a misfortune; to be accused of complicity in four looks like carelessness.

  Gatt was also accused of helping his accomplice Fabio Psaila escape from police custody and with attempting to prevent Dr John Zammit Montebello from contacting the police after treating Darren Debono, another accomplice who had suffered gunshot wounds in the failed Attard robbery.

  Daphne blogged about Gatt in 2011:

  This David Gatt appears to believe that he falls into the criminal mastermind category, at least if the current testimony is anything to go by. But that testimony reads like a film-script about small-town hooligans dreaming about the big-time and bungling their way to what they think is the top while modelling themselves on their Mafia heroes. With all that talk of initiation rites involving burnt holy pictures, drops of blood from pricked hands, candles, codes, and the use of Italian, it’s like the story of a bunch of bored teenage boys trying to enact a fantasy in the garden shed before being called in for supper. The fantasy element is heightened by the use of the names of real Mafia people as code for the plotters in the shed. But the thing is that they’re not teenage boys. They’re grown men with connections in the police force, the law, and heaven knows what else, besides access to lethal weapons, so when they decide to act out their criminal fantasies they are in the ideal position to do so.