BREAKING/ ‘Billionaire’ in talks with government to buy Air Malta is Ponzi scheme fraudster who changed his name last year

FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND

The Sunday Times of Malta broke the news yesterday that the Maltese government is in talks with Edward Banayoti of Banayoti Holdings Ltd for the purchase by him of 49.9% of Air Malta, and that Banayoti has made a formal offer.

“We can confirm that talks with the Office of the Prime Minister and other senior government officials are ongoing and that we have submitted a formal offer for the minority shareholding in Air Malta (49.9%), currently for sale,” a spokesman Banayoti told The Sunday Times. “We are now awaiting an official response from the government.”

The government confirmed this morning that it had met Banayoti and discussed the matter with him, but denied that it is in formal talks. The reason for this denial, however, is that under its negotiation agreement with Alitalia, the it is precluded from opening negotiations with any other party until talks with the Italian airline are formally terminated.

The Sunday Times report exposed the government as having breached the terms of its negotiation agreement with Alitalia by opening talks with Edward Banayoti before the conclusion of its talks with the Italian airline.

This website can reveal that Banayoti stayed for nine weeks at the Hilton after being asked by the government to for the outcome of discussions with Alitalia.

NOW FOR THE BIG STORY OF THE WEEK

Until March last year, when he changed his name under Canadian law as it is permissible to do in that jurisdiction, Edward Banayoti was Ernie/Ernest Anderson, an unlicensed investment adviser in Ontario, who ran a Ponzi scheme through his (also unlicensed) Golden Gate Funds, which resulted in his being slapped with penalties of more than $4 million and barred for life from acting as an investments advisor.

The people who bought into his fund lost their money, some of them even their life-savings, like this old couple who gave him $450,000 and lost it all.

That article in Canada’s leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail, was published in August 2013, just three years ago. It describes how 150 investors put more than $8 million into Anderson’s Golden Gate Fund. When it collapsed in 2008/2009, the case was heard before the Ontario Securities Commission tribunal, which cannot impose jail time.

The result was a settlement in 2009 in which Ernest Anderson acknowledged using investor funds not to invest in mortgages, as he told investors, but to cover operating costs and to make payments to previous investors. The tribunal ruled that he was to pay $4.7 million in penalties which, up to the date that the newspaper article was written, four years later, had not been paid. The Globe and Mail reports: “Mr. Anderson, who hasn’t been charged with any crime in connection with the case, could not be reached for comment.”

THE GENESIS OF A BIG STORY BEGINS WITH A SUSPICIOUS DETAIL

I had never heard of Edward Banayoti before I read the report in The Sunday Times, but he was supposed to be a billionaire with deep and wide involvement in aviation and defence in Canada, so I imagined there would be plenty on line. But there is almost nothing.

There isn’t a single reference to him that predates 2015. All references to him are dated 2016, except for one in 2015 which is the crux of this story – but more about that later. It is as though he came into being this year. Even his companies, registered in the UK with an address in London, were incorporated in 2016.

How was this possible? It nagged at me all afternoon and evening – but my initial bewildered reaction, that he seemed to have come into being in 2016, turned out to be accurate in a way I couldn’t have foretold or thought possible.

Late at night I had an email from a friend in Canada, with a PDF attached. It was the Ontario Gazette – the equivalent of the Malta Government Gazette, and in the same format – dated 21 March 2015. It had come up in my initial search on ‘Edward Banayoti’ but I hadn’t bothered downloading the PDF, because ploughing through it for what I imagined would be an obscure and pointless reference to him seemed like something I should do only after I’d read everything else that was more useful.

But as it turned out, it should have been the first thing I read. Canadian law allows people to change their name after certain formalities are met, but all such name-changes have to be registered and published in the province’s government gazette. And right there, among the list of name-changes registered in the preceding fortnight, was the fact that Ernie Anderson had changed his name to Edward Banayoti. Here is the gazette in question: ontario-gazette-21-march-2015

From there on, we were on a roll. Searches on Ernie/Ernest Anderson threw up references to the Ponzi scheme, the documents pertaining to the tribunal hearings, the tribunal judge’s decision, and newspaper articles and bios which made reference to Ernest Anderson being an Egyptian born in Egypt, who studied at Cairo University and emigrated to Canada. He eventually became a Canadian citizen. And at some point, it seems obvious to conclude on the basis that no Egyptians are called Ernie Anderson, he changed his name to something he thought very Anglo-Saxon, only he didn’t know at the time that Ernie is not a name but a nickname. So while his legal name was Ernie, he later learned enough to call himself Ernest.

We have so far been unable to track down the government gazette which registers the original name-change, because years ago they were not on line. But some kind of instinct tells me that when he changed his name again last year, it wasn’t so much a change of name as a reversion to his original birth/family name. Banayotti/Banayoti is an Egyptian family name of Greek origin among the Coptic community there, and we know that he had to convert to Islam (or pretend to) when he married King Abdullah of Jordan’s sister last January, so he will have had a Christian first name.

Ah yes, that marriage – which seems to have been the main point of interest for many who read that story. The timeline indicates that it was the catalyst for his name-change from Ernie Anderson to Edward Banayoti. He changed his name in March and in January he married Aisha bint al Hussein of Jordan, 48, a sister of the present king, Abdullah, and daughter of the former king, Hussein, and the Englishwoman he had married in 1961 and divorced in 1972, Antoinette Avril Gardiner, who took the name Muna.

Princess Aisha is actually a major-general in the Jordanian army, who lives in Washington, where she is defence attache at the Jordanian embassy. Her contracting of a marriage with this individual offers us some scant consolation in that the due diligence methods of the Royal Hashemite Court are as bad as Malta’s. She married him on 27 January this year. Four weeks later, they were separated – and by July they were formally divorced.

Though there are several photographs of Princess/Major General Aisha bint al Hussein on line, there are none of the two of them together, not even the sort of photograph you would expect to be released with a palace statement – and there was one – announcing their marriage. And you will only find a single photograph of Edward Banayoti, one which he himself uploaded to Wiki Commons, an oddly calculated act.

Serendipitously, The Globe and Mail in Canada proffers what is also the sole available online photograph of Ernest Anderson, an archive shot from several years ago. It shows clearly that despite his Anglo-Saxon name, Ernest Anderson wasn’t lying when he said that he came from Egypt. The Ernest Anderson in that picture is a younger, thinner, darker-haired, moustachioed version of the dumpier, greyer and moustache-free Edward Banayoti in the other picture. They are the same man.

A NEW NAME, BUT STILL A SHYSTER

All the companies – and there are many – that Edward Banayoti owns and of which he is a director have two things in common: they were incorporated in the UK in the last year, after he changed his name, and they are all letter-box companies with no office or any other kind of premises.

The UK address at which they are registered – 239 High Street Kensington – is a Regus temporary/flexible office building where he is not even renting an office but using Regus’s ‘virtual office’ service, which means simply paying Regus a monthly fee to use its address and have post delivered there.

Edward Banayoti’s companies also have two Ontario addresses, one in Mississauga and another in Toronto, but simple searches reveal that they too are nothing but ‘virtual addresses’ in space operated by the office rental company Regus for that purpose.