Playing about with words – it’s Keith Schembri not Kasco

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff has denied, a week after The Sunday Times published its story, that his business, Kasco, has a company in the British Virgin Islands.

The operate word is ‘now’, but he didn’t use it. Kasco did have a company there and it is the one which Jacob Borg at The Sunday Times found and wrote about. The only reason he could find that name is because it was published in the Government Gazette of that jurisdiction as having been struck off for not having paid its fees. That was in 2011.

So allow me to put things into perspective here, and clear up the confusion caused by that massively misleading front-page headline on the Times of Malta. Kasco Holdings did have a company in the British Virgin Islands and it was struck off in 2011. The company had been set up by Brian Tonna of Nexia BT.

That same year – 2011 – Brian Tonna set up two companies in the British Virgin Islands with Keith Schembri personally as the ultimate owner of one and Adrian Hillman personally as the ultimate owner of the other.

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff has sought deliberately to mislead the public and the Times of Malta. I have made the point repeatedly on this website that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff’s holdings in the British Virgin Islands are his personally and not for his ‘legitimate’ Kasco business. I put ‘legitimate’ in inverted commas advisedly. Schembri has at no time denied holding a company in the British Virgin Islands himself and when I broke story two or three weeks ago he refused to comment and released a press statement in which he avoided the subject altogether.