Prime Minister’s aide launches attack on HSBC while Prime Minister tries to rescue relationships with American banks

One of the Prime Minister’s three chief aides, Glenn Bedingfield – the other two are Keith Schembri and Kurt Farrugia – this morning launched an assault on HSBC Bank Malta in reaction to this story and to distract attention from the reported facts about Keith Schembri’s state of health and his absence from the Prime Minister’s Office.

This follows on yesterday’s launch of a petition against the bank, started and promoted by three persons occupying ‘positions of trust’ under Konrad Mizzi, the Minister Within the Office of the Prime Minister: former Super One employees Julia Farrugia and Alex Cutajar, and Neville Gafa, the key player in the Libyan medical visas scandal.

The Prime Minister’s and Konrad Mizzi’s aides have gone to war on HSBC Bank – something they should never do no matter the circumstances – even though I have said categorically that the information comes from a bank statement found in the vast tranche of documents called the Panama Papers.

That bank statement came from Mossack Fonseca’s server in Panama, and not from HSBC Bank in Malta, because Nexia BT emailed it to Mossack Fonseca along with other documents which that law firm required to set up secret companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands for the Maltese prime minister’s chief of staff.

The bank statement and all those other documents are accessible to The Malta Independent and the Times of Malta and the hundreds of other partners, on the Panama Papers, of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. I simply noticed, on that statement, the three payments which the Prime Minister’s chief of staff made to a private hospital in Rome last year, what they signified in relation to his current absence from the office for reasons concealed from the public, and wrote about it.

Of far more importance is the manner in which aides to the Prime Minister and to the Minister Within the Office of the Prime Minister have launched a sustained and organised assault on an international bank in Malta, clearly with the approval of their bosses, and without regard to the consequences and implications. This is something else that is going to be reported and disseminated by those who work for and in the financial services market, adding to Malta’s rapidly deteriorating reputation for political corruption, weak administrative systems and unpredictability at the top.