Though he’s lying low, don’t forget John Dalli
The third Panama company, Egrant Inc, set up by Brian Tonna and Karl Cini of Nexia BT alongside Konrad Mizzi’s Hearnville Inc and Keith Schembri’s Tillgate Inc, is not necessarily Joseph Muscat’s. I think it is more likely to be John Dalli’s. No details of Egrant Inc are available in the Panama Papers because none were sent by email. The documents in the Panama Papers, for the other two, are all either emails or documents sent by email attachment. If it wasn’t in an email, then it isn’t there. What we do have is an email in which Nexia BT says it will give details of Egrant Inc’s intended ultimate beneficial owner via Skype call.
This, to me, doesn’t sound like the Prime Minister. It sounds like Dalli. Don’t ask me why I think that – pure instinct. Muscat, Mizzi and Schembri operate as a tight unit. If Tonna was going to Skype for Muscat, then he would have Skyped for Mizzi and Schembri too. Whoever Egrant Inc was for, the Skype call wasn’t because he was more important. It was because he was different – with them, but separate, and also older and with a very long record in covering his tracks and protecting himself with a firewall of secrecy. Also, Dalli is known not to trust even his collaborators implicitly, which is why his henchmen are his daughters.
On 1 July 2013, The International Herald Tribune reported that John Dalli had secretly visited the Bahamas the previous summer (2012) when he was still a European Commissioner. He was sacked a few weeks after that secret visit because of an entirely different matter, the snus bribery case, so when the Tribune broke the story, Dalli was living in Malta cosily in the Labour government’s lap, Police Commissioner Rizzo having been removed three months earlier because he planned to prosecute him.
That same day, the story was picked up by The New York Times, which owns the Tribune (in fact its name has since been changed to The International New York Times). It reported:
The lingering mystery around Mr. Dalli has now deepened, however. Even while he was being investigated in the tobacco case last summer, he took at least two trips to the Bahamas as part of an effort to arrange the transfer of tens of millions of dollars.
Those trips, and their aim, were confirmed by one of his hosts in the islands — and by Mr. Dalli himself. In an interview on Friday, he said he was facilitating the transfer of a huge sum to a charitable project “to help people in Africa.”
Calling the project very personal and confidential, he would not discuss its details. But he insisted that nothing unseemly was going on. He said that he personally had no accounts in the Bahamas, that he was not being paid and that the money was not for him, but rather would be put into a trust for the charity.
On 5 July, I acquired Barry Connor’s number in the Bahamas and interviewed him over the telephone. This is one of the questions/answers.
Me: You said that you discussed a trust with Dalli.
Connor: Yes, they were talking about a trust in the Bahamas with his daughters as protectors of the trust through a company. They couldn’t be trustees because trustees have to be Bahamanian.
Me: Were you going to be the trustee?
Connor: No.
On 6 July, Mark Micallef at the Times of Malta covered the story and interviewed Barry Connor as part of it. This is from that report:
Contacted in Nassau in the Bahamas, Mr Connor stood by the version he gave the Herald and told Times of Malta that Mr Dalli had once told him he intended setting up a trust in the name of his daughters with money from Dubai.
“I can only say what he told me, that they wanted to move this money to the Bahamas and, initially, I was told it was coming from a bank in Dubai. Then I was told it was coming from Chase Manhattan Bank in New York,” he said, referring to the period of August and September 2012.
On this point of money transfer, Mr Dalli had acknowledged talk of a fund being set up for the purposes of the charity venture but said the money would come from private sources.
He also said Mr Connor had offered a trust he owned to serve as a vehicle for the operation, but Mr Connor denied this.
“No, there was no discussion on any project and the discussion on the trust was a way in which he could have control of the trust… I don’t know of any charitable venture. Discussions were had with people who wanted investments in business ventures… he was interested in these business proposals.
“The only reference to Africa I know of was that they were going to promote these products (energy-efficient engines) in Africa.”
Most of the discussions were in September just before Mr Dalli left the archipelago, Mr Connor claimed, adding that the former commissioner said he would be sending his two daughters to be “protectors” in a fund in the Bahamas.
“He asked me to speak to a trustee and I reported back to him.”
When Malta Today interviewed him, Dalli vehemently denied owning a trust, bank accounts or any form of money in the Bahamas. And I believe him, because a few weeks after his sojourn in the Caribbean, Jose Manuel Barroso kicked him out of his European Commissioner’s post, giving him half an hour to clear his desk. Other priorities took over for him, including dealing with OLAF and with Police Commissioner Rizzo back home in Malta. He let the Bahamas villa go, failing to pay the rent – and forcing Connor to come calling in Malta, knocking on his daughter Claire Gauci Borda’s door to get it. Meanwhile, he hid from Rizzo in Belgium and Germany, using ‘medical certificates’ issued by a German spa doctor, saying that his psycho-social problems prevented him from flying to Malta.
He returned to Malta shortly before the general election, when Rizzo was distracted by all the usual election problems (including, it has to be said, ordering my arrest on the eve of polling day) and then, shortly after the election, Rizzo was removed and a government puppet, Peter Paul Zammit, installed in his stead.
The Labour Party was elected on 8th March, and on 13th March, Brian Tonna began the process to set up three companies in Panama, with the shares held by trusts in New Zealand: Tillgate for Keith Schembri, Hearnville for Konrad Mizzi, and Egrant.
As for Barry Connor saying that Dalli told him he needed a trust in the Bahamas to hold money from Dubai in his daughters’ names, I hardly think he was making that up. Why on earth would he, and if so, why Dubai? It’s not the first country that occurs to somebody who has lived in the Bahamas all his life.
Practically every month, somebody different emails or texts me from a Malta-Dubai or Dubai-Malta flight to say that John Dalli is on the plane. When his wife died, he was in Dubai and didn’t even fly back the same day. After a decent interval, he flew back again.
John Dalli dropped the idea of a trust in the Bahamas for money from Dubai, but I think he may well have got himself a company in Panama. Lord Egrant may well be 25 years older than his protector in government.
