Keith Schembri, Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat to host Azerbaijan’s Energy Minister this week
Konrad Mizzi, Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri will be hosting Azerbaijan’s Minister for Energy at the ‘Mediterranean Leadership Summit’ which starts here in Malta on Thursday.
How appropriate that the Energy Minister of one of the world’s most notoriously corrupt countries should arrive in Malta in the middle of a slew of corruption reports in Malta, to be hosted by our own corrupt gang of four (because we can’t forget Brian Tonna, can we).
I hope that by now, and after their failed attempts at nine banks at least in the world’s shadiest jurisdictions, those looters have managed at last to find some bank who will take them, because otherwise how are they going to populate their no-longer-secret offshore companies with assets? Keith Schembri has got a secret offshore bank account already, tied to his older British Virgin Islands company which was set up when he could hide the fact that he was already, as somebody who worked for the Labour Party but had no official role or status, a politically exposed person.
And Brian Tonna has one too, because though he is now incontrovertibly a politically exposed person through his business, personal and political relationship with the Prime Minister’s Office, the Prime Minister and his chief of staff, back in June 2013 when he set up his secret company in the British Virgin Islands, it was still possible for him to conceal this fact and present himself as a financial services consultant. That is how he is able to invoice, through his BVI company, his company in Malta and pay out much of the money he receives for selling Maltese passports, from his desk in the Office of the Prime Minister, to his BVI company – making it look as though somebody else is billing him and that’s a tax-deductible expense.
