Central Bank deputy governor’s testimony in court yesterday: former companion reacts

Anna Zelbst, former companion of Alfred Mifsud, deputy governor of the Central Bank, and mother of his two youngest children, has reacted on a news portal comments board to his testimony in court yesterday. A screenshot of her comment is below.

Both Mr Mifsud and I testified yesterday in the libel case he has brought against me for reporting Mrs Zlebst account of how he had taken a large sum of money in cash from the business operator Ronnie Demajo, who died last year, in the late 1990s when he was chairman of Mid-Med Bank (later sold to HSBC). Mr Demajo’s company was the Malta representative for Eastpoint, the US company which won a contract from Mid-Med Bank for a banking system which HSBC then scrapped as unsuitable.

The article for which Mr Mifsud sued me does not identify either the source of my report or the businessman in question. Both were identified in later reports on this website after Mrs Zelbst gave her consent for disclosure. She will also testify in court.

In his defence, Mr Mifsud yesterday attempted to portray the mother of his son and daughter as a liar motivated by the desire for revenge after he refused to give in to her “requests for money and property”. He portrayed her request for maintenance and basic assets as being unreasonable, saying that “I owe her nothing because we were not married at law”. Mrs Zelbst is now in her early 60s and says he asked her to stop working when their children were born.

Mr Mifsud’s lawyer, Pawlu Lia, in his hostile questioning of his own witness (I was called as a witness for the plaintiff and was not testifying in my own defence yesterday), attempted to portray me as somebody whose motivation to damage Mr Mifsud, who is associated with the Labour Party, dovetailed with Mrs Zelbst motivation to damage him for revenge.

I replied that I have known Mr Mifsud for around 20 years and we have never had anything other than a civil relationship and courteous exchanges, which he confirmed. But an important news story concerning the sole candidate for the governorship of Malta’s Central Bank remains an important news story, which it would be a dereliction of duty to leave unreported.

Dr Lia is legal counsel to the Labour Party and to cabinet minister Christian Cardona and his ‘person of trust’ Joe Gerada, in their suits against me in the matter of their visit to the FKK Acapulco in Germany. It was he who advised them to slap garnishee orders of almost €50,000 on me, freezing my bank account, and was only dissuaded from filing “several other cases” on the same matter, each accompanied by a garnishee order of €11,500, by the immensely bad publicity which ensued, including a public fund-raising campaign which collected enough to cover the garnishees and legal expenses in just 24 hours.

Dr Lia repeatedly asked me for “proof” (the buzzword of the moment). I replied that there is no proof better than an eyewitness account of somebody who was there at the time, and that this has even been sufficient for members of a jury to find a person guilty of murder, let alone as evidence in a civil suit. Dr Lia is aware of this, which is why he and his client are now trying to undermine Mrs Zelbst’s credibility by attributing motives to her that don’t change the facts of the case.

Here are the newspaper reports of yesterday’s hearing at the Courts of Justice, should you not have read them already: The Malta Independent – Times of Malta – Malta Today