Identity Malta: Lying under the cover of blanket secrecy

Lalit Modi was brought to Malta for the first time in 2014 by Adrian Hillman, who has just resigned from his position as managing director of the Allied Group of Companies, publishers of the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times. Hillman introduced him to Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, and he then met the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister confirmed that he met him when Opposition deputy leader Mario Demarco brought the matter up in Parliament. The Prime Minister did not give the circumstances of the meeting or who made the introduction, but said that he met Modi (who he did not name specifically) “informally”.

Modi applied for Maltese citizenship under the government’s 2013 purchase scheme and his application was made through Brian Tonna, the man who is responsible for setting up secret Panamanian companies for Keith Schembri and Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi, and secret offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands for Schembri and for Adrian Hillman.

Modi’s relationship with Brian Tonna and his colleague Karl Cini was first revealed in the press in India, which published copies of emailed from Modi to an American associate, on which both Tonna and Cini were copied in.

Lalit Modi is also registered in Malta at an “address of convenience” – a basement flat in Heliopolis Court at the Xemxija limits of St Paul’s Bay. It is not anywhere he would choose to live or even holiday, which leaves us to conclude that Modi has been given the use of this postal address simply to fit the requirements of spending (in this case, pretending to spend) time in Malta so as to qualify for the purchase of citizenship.

We should remember at this point that it is not necessary for him to actually purchase Maltese citizenship under the scheme, because the Minister of the Interior is empowered under the law to use his discretion in the ex officio granting/refusal of citizenship to whomsoever he may please and without justification for it, as happened in the notorious case in which the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Mallia, granted Maltese citizenship to his own wife two years ago.

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Lalit Modi