Shouldn’t the Malta Police be investigating John Dalli for his involvement in this Ponzi scheme?
There are a lot of elderly American ladies, members of a Christian group, who were conned out of their life savings, which were sent to a client account held by John Dalli’s company Corporate Group Ltd at HSBC in St Julian’s. And these are just the ones we know about.
It’s a massive Ponzi scheme running into the hundreds of millions – the very hundreds of millions Dalli said – when news of his trip broke in the New York Times three years ago – that he flew to the Bahamas to talk about.
His fraudster client Mary Swan, known as Lady Bird or LB, who was at the time living in and operating out of a flat in Sliema’s High Street (close to Stella Maris parish church), tried to operate the scam in Malta too and might well have succeeded.
When I found out where she was staying – I also got her two mobile numbers but she rang off immediately I introduced myself – I immediately rang her landlord, a prominent doctor who I know, to warn him that his tenant is a big-time criminal and fraudster who moves about the world using different aliases and false passports.
He told me that I must have the wrong person because the tenants of his flat are two elderly American Christians, very nice people, who do a lot of charity work in Africa and India, investing charity money in gold mines and then using the profits to build schools and so on.
“They showed me photos of sacks of gold nuggets and of the mines,” he said. “They had leaflets and descriptions.”
Obviously they did, I said to him – that’s exactly how they persuade people to part with their money. I now wonder whether he parted with some of his. I truly hope that he did not.
It’s really odd how many otherwise supremely intelligent people think that major fraudsters come to us marked ‘fraudster’. The successful ruse is the hallmark of the successful fraudster.
And this doesn’t apply only to Mary Swan/Lady Bird. Let’s face it – who would have thought that a European Commissioner was helping to run a major Ponzi scheme?
