My email to Christian Kalin of Henley & Partners right now

I have just sent this in response to an email from Christian Kalin of Henley & Partners, which is reproduced further below.

Christian,

I am extremely annoyed at your lawyers’ high-handed attitude and more than annoyed at the fact that a company feels itself empowered to sell a country’s citizenship against the will of the citizens of that country and by underhand agreement with a government that does not have an electoral mandate for it and then has the sheer brass neck to begin going after journalists and real citizens of that country who object to it.

If this government is voted out, you will have no trade in Maltese passports at all, and the vast majority of citizens of this country hope it happens.

As I had occasion to tell you when we met, Malta is not St Kitts & Nevis. You can behave like a colonial power, throwing your weight about against the press and legitimate criticism, in St Kitts & Nevis, but you can’t do it here.

I do not appreciate your threat to sue me in London. The reason you are doing it is not because ‘most of your business is there’. Most of your business comes from shady people in Russia and the Middle East, with the occasional Vietnamese MP thrown in.

The reason you are threatening to sue me in London is because you imagine that I am somebody from the sticks who is frightened of the words ‘London’, ‘UK courts’ and ‘high costs’.

I would be fascinated to see the adverse publicity surrounding any court case in which your shady outfit goes after a blogger in the EU member state where you are abusively selling Maltese citizenship – the fact that you have an agreement with a corrupt government does not make it non-abusive – against the will of the people who hold a Maltese passport by birthright.

Henley & Partners must be the most unpopular outfit in Malta right now after Pilatus Bank – an outfit owned by somebody who bought a St Kitts & Nevis passport from you – and that other outfit run by Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri, with whom you signed an agreement decided upon before they came to power.

I trust you have some understanding of the low regard in which Henley & Partners is held by the real citizens of Malta, and I await your reassurance that you are not bankrolling Muscat’s outfit in this electoral campaign so as to ensure that he is returned to power and you can carry on selling the passports of my country.

Daphne Caruana Galizia

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That email was a prompt response to the following one, received this morning.

Hi Daphne
 
I just was made aware of this post. 
 
Did you receive another letter that upset you or what is the issue? I understood from our interactions, and from Mishcon’s last communication (which was however quite some time ago) that you had agreed to remove the defamatory and incorrect posts on your blog.  Kindly advise.
 
Basically we will need you to remove not everything of course, but those statements that are clearly defamatory and incorrect. If that is not done we have no other choice than following the advice of our lawyers and start proceedings in London as this is where all of this internet blogs has most impact on our business.
 
Hopefully we can avoid that and continue a reasonable dialogue, which I always find is better than any alternative. We simply want to stay out of the political issues Malta faces and do our business – in Malta or elsewhere.  Hope you understand…
 
Best
Chris
 
 
Dr. Christian H. Kälin TEP IMCM
Group Chairman & CEO
 
Henley & Partners Holdings Ltd