Keith Schembri sues The Malta Independent – but gives no explanation for the HSBC documents

One News has reported that Keith Schembri has filed a libel suit against The Malta Independent for reporting on my story of last Friday about HSBC documents appeared to have been forged.

The Malta Independent, which has not yet been served, found out about the libel suit from a report on the Labour Party media, which had clearly been briefed by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. The Labour media report also says, in intimidating fashion, that “there is no inquiry at HSBC” and that “documents proving that there is no inquiry will be presented in court”.

This is a clear threat to HSBC Bank plc by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. I have been informed by very senior sources at the bank that an inquiry began immediately over the weekend and that it has since been escalated to “regional director level”.

Lawyers acting for the Prime Minister’s chief of staff first issued a threat to The Malta Independent yesterday afternoon (the story was published in the morning), asking them to take down their report from the portal and publish a dictated correction saying that the documents are not fraudulent and that the bank is not conducting an inquiry (they were not delegated to speak on the bank’s behalf), or face libel proceedings. The Malta Independent obviously did not give in to the threat, and the libel suit followed.

At no point did either Keith Schembri or his lawyers offer an explanation for the fact that the bank’s ‘information reports’ (character references) for him and his associate Malcolm Scerri, who runs Kasco Ltd, were issued in May 2013 purportedly by HSBC’s Attard branch, which had closed more than a year earlier, in February 2012.

I shall withhold comment on the hypocrisy and conniving corruption of a Prime Minister’s chief of staff who, instead of resigning in disgrace when he is discovered to be operating through secret companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands, instead threatens a newspaper and now even a bank, all the while refusing to explain why those documents (and companies) exist in the first place.