UPDATED/Brian Tonna bought £17m house in London last year through secret British Virgin Islands company

Updated with Brian Tonna’s reply, further below.

Early last year, shortly before this website revealed that he had set up secret companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand for Konrad Mizzi (the Minister for Energy), for Keith Schembri (the Prime Minister’s chief of staff), and for a third unnamed individual, their co-conspirator Brian Tonna bought a large house in London for £17 million.

The purchase was made through a company which he owns in the British Virgin Islands, Willerby Trade Inc, which he acquired in June 2013. The background details to this company are here.

Willerby Trade Inc was designed to be secret and concealed from the Maltese state authorities, with Tonna’s ownership hidden by Mossack Fonseca nominees – but his cover was blown through the worldwide release of the Panama Papers documents containing the entire cache of emails – hundreds of thousands of documents – from Mossack Fonseca’s server in Panama.

A very important point here is that Tonna is not just the accountant who made the arrangements for Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and the third individual, but their co-conspirator. He had a company set up for himself at the same time he set up companies for them. The only difference is that their companies are in Panama and his is in the British Virgin Islands.

Tonna paid for the London mansion last year through Willerby Trade Inc’s account at Pilatus Bank in Malta. He paid £5 million as a deposit, with an agreement to pay the remaining £12 million in instalments.

Pilatus Bank is a small private operation, which is owned by an Iranian with a St Kitts & Nevis passport, Seyed Ali Sadr Hasheminejad. Hasheminejad has four passports in total, with two different years of birth: 1975 and 1980.

The company applied for a Maltese banking licence after the Labour Party was elected to government in 2013.

Tonna was instrumental in pushing the application through: the Malta Financial Services Authority granted Pilatus a banking licence in August 2015. Most of its 100 or so private clients have been referred by Tonna himself, who calls regularly at the bank’s offices in Ta’ Xbiex for meetings with the CEO and another executive.

Pilatus has no banking licence granted anywhere else in the world, but the Malta Financial Services Authority had approved its passporting licence for all European Union member states.

The bank has an unmarked and completely anonymous office at 4, Old Park Lane, London, to which it never refers publicly. It can’t even be called a brass-plate or letterbox company, because there is neither on the door. There is nothing to indicate that there is a bank’s representative office or any kind of business operation within.

When this website visited yesterday afternoon, the attendant in the completely empty and anonymous reception area, which has nothing to indicate the identity of any occupiers of the building, or even that there are any occupiers at all, was unfamiliar with the name ‘Pilatus’ and said, “Oh, you mean the bank? There’s nobody there, and I can’t let you go up because all the alarms will go off. But Anna might be in tomorrow.”

This website has contacted Brian Tonna for his comment, but he has not replied. Calls made to his mobile phone were cut off. This message was sent to his mobile phone number and to his email address at Nexia BT:

Early last year, before the Panama Papers documents were published round the world, revealing that you are the UBO of a secret company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, Willerby Trade Inc, that company bought a house in London for £17 million, with £5m as a down payment and the rest to be settled in instalments. 

The payment transfer to the seller was made through Pilatus Bank, where Willerby Trade Inc has an account. 

This is a request for your comment.

Daphne Caruana Galizia

Brian Tonna has since replied with the following email:

Dear Ms Caruana Galizia
 
I refer to your blog post, just uploaded, in which you assert that I acquired a property in London for ₤17m through Willerby Trade Inc.
 
Your assertion is a complete and blatant fabrication. For the record, I have never acquired, directly or indirectly, any immovable property in London.
 
Also for the record, your email to me was received at 9.50am this morning.
 
All my rights are reserved.
 
 
Brian Tonna
Managing Partner
 
Nexia BT | The Penthouse, Suite 2, Capital Business Centre, Entrance C, Triq taz-Zwejt, San Gwann SGN 3000, Malta
T: +356 2163 7778 | F: +356 2163 4383
[email protected] | www.nexiabt.com

This website stands by its story and draws your attention to the fact that Tonna does not mention Pilatus Bank, his ownership of Willerby Trade Inc, or the fact that Willerby Trade Inc, whose ultimate beneficial owner was concealed from the Maltese authorities, has an account there.

Two days ago, the Financial Times published an article about how London’s housing crisis is caused in great part by the large-scale purchase of property through offshore companies using illicit funds. This is driving prices upwards and making them unaffordable to legitimate buyers.

“There are two good reasons why the UK should be putting up more effective barriers to the illicit funds that wash up so prodigiously on Britain’s shores,” the newspaper said. “The first relates to the UK’s credibility in the campaign against corruption.

“Successive governments have taken centre stage in the global war against this scourge. But their stance has always looked a little Janus-faced, on the one hand offering support to those battling corrupt practises in the developing world, on the other doing too little in practical terms to prevent the proceeds from ending up in Britain.

“The second reason is the nefarious effect that the laundering of ill-gotten gains is having domestically. In a recent report, Faulty Towers, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International outlines how vast sums laundered through UK property are contributing to a housing crisis, particularly in London — leading to the underuse of stock and over-heating of prices.”

Britain’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is now looking into compiling a register that would list the beneficial owners of offshore and other non-British companies which have bought real estate in the United Kingdom. There is no such register now.

The Financial Times reports that since 2004, law enforcement agencies “have identified £180m worth of property in London linked to the suspected proceeds of corruption, with 75 per cent of cases investigated involving overseas companies that obscure the real owners”.

But that is just a tiny part of the problem. Using publicly available sources, Transparency International has found that in London alone, PEPs (politically exposed persons) from different parts of the world have bought some £4.2 billion of real estate using funds from suspect origins.

For background to Brian Tonna’s Willerby Trade Inc and his involvement in the sale of Maltese citizenship and residence visas in the Middle East, read here and also here.