Adrian Hillman and Keith Schembri: Let’s stop trying to obscure the essential facts

The sandstorm of court cases, judicial letters, protests and counter-claims which Adrian Hillman and Keith Schembri have thrown up is designed to serve a sole purpose: to obscure the incontrovertible, documented facts which started all this – that they set up companies in the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar and Cyprus, that they kept these companies secret from the authorities in Malta, and that they are in unspecified business together. It is a safe deduction that this business is illegal, which is why the money has to be laundered through those operations.

Hillman is now behaving as though he was unjustly sacked from his position as managing director of the publishers of the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times, and acts as though this is all quibbling about whether he spent money without authorisation or not.

The bottom line is that he was the employee – the managing director, but still an employee – of a large publishing and printing company and that he set up companies, secretly, in offshore jurisdictions, linked to bank accounts. He did not inform his employers of these companies, and if he were doing nothing illegal, he would have had no reason to set them up in the first place, because his only source of income – officially – is what they pay him as a salary.

Worse still, after the Labour Party was elected to government, Hillman took steps – using corrupt accountant Brian Tonna for the purpose – to increase the secrecy of his company in the British Virgin Islands, acting alongside and in tandem with Keith Schembri, who by then was the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

That alone is enough to get any managing director fired by the board, as any reasonable person will know. Any further quibbling about how funds were spent or whether bribes were taken is a separate discussion.