Another one of Joe Sammut’s Libyan clients has been sentenced for fraud

Times of Malta reports that a Libyan businessman, Nurredin Mohammed Shaibi, was sentenced today for fraud. The newspaper gives the name of the company but clearly didn’t even bother to perform the simple task of looking it up on the Malta Financial Services Authority portal, which would have revealed that this company is yet another of corrupt accountant Joe Sammut’s clients. He is the auditor.

Mayar International was set up on 20 June 2013 and registered at 15 Grognet Street Mosta, one of Joe Sammut’s addresses. The share capital was originally Eur1,200, the minimum required to set up a company, and the stated objective was trade in foodstuff.

On 20 August 2013, Sammut wrote to the Malta Financial Services Authority to say that Mayar International Ltd’s share capital had been increased through the purchase of trading stock (the system Sammut used for his other Libyan clients – stock), by Shaibi, using his own funds.

This brought the share capital to a perfectly neat 100,000 shares of one euro each – precisely enough to qualify Nurredin Mohammed Shaibi for a residency permit in Malta.

Veronique Dalli, Shaibi’s defence lawyer, told the court that her client has lived in Malta for 10 years and that he merely slipped up on certain new documentation procedures which were introduced this summer and with which he was unfamiliar as he had been used to the other system.

Ah, but Mayar International Ltd is not ten years old. It is two years old. It was set up shortly after the Labour Party was elected to government, and must have been set up for a reason other than trade.

That, and not what was reported in court, is the most interesting part of the story.

Times of Malta also reports that Mayar International Ltd’s offices are in San Gwann. That’s the latest registered address. The company officially moved there on 4th August, just a month ago, around the time Joe Sammut was under investigation. Before that, it was registered at his office in Mosta.

So we are expected to believe that this company which supposedly trades in food, and which is owned by someone who supposedly has lived in Malta for a decade, was operating out of its auditor’s office in Mosta.

If Shaibi has lived in Malta for 10 years already, why didn’t he use his own address?