No need for a private audit into Konrad Mizzi’s affairs when the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit has carried out a forensic investigation already

UPDATE: An important point has just occurred to me, which should be obvious but which has been missed. Muscat and Konrad Mizzi, and the government trolls who pollute the comments-boards, keep insisting that what Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri did “was not illegal”. 

But if it were not illegal – criminal, because the police only deal with crimes and not with breaches of civil law – Manfred Galdes would not have given the FIAU report directly to the Police Commissioner with a request for action.

There you have the surest evidence yet that Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi were/are involved in criminal activity.
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Read this story in The Malta Independent. Sven Giegold, a member of the European Parliament’s Panama Papers Committee, has made the same point I have been making here for months: that the government’s supposed audit by a private firm, of Konrad Mizzi’s dealings, is ridiculous and pointless given that there has been a specialised forensic audit already by a state department empowered to seek information across countries under the law – the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit.

The Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, when it was led by Manfred Galdes, investigated the key figures involved in the Panama Papers fall-out and transferred its report to the then Commissioner of Police, Michael Cassar, who then took extended leave of absence from work, and never returned, announcing his resignation instead. Some weeks later, Galdes himself resigned, no doubt over the failure of the police to act on his unit’s investigation.

What Giegold doesn’t seem to know, however, is that as far as Muscat and the government he leads are concerned, the general public does not know about that FIAU report because the only place where its existence has been reported is on this website. I was able to report it after sources at the Police Headquarters confirmed to me that Commissioner Michael Cassar had met Manfred Galdes, then the FIAU chief, who had presented him with the report and asked for action.

The whereabouts of that report, after Cassar’s departure, are now unknown.

Pretending that there is no FIAU report and ignoring the facts specified on this website has allowed the Prime Minister and Konrad Mizzi to keep talking about a private audit commissioned from a consultancy firm, safe in the knowledge that nobody – except me, and now Giegold – is going to say to them: “You don’t need a private audit. You have a massive and thorough forensic investigation report carried out by the FIAU, in the Police Commissioner’s Office and probably still on file at the FIAU unless somebody has destroyed all records of it.”