Deputy registrar in Egrant Inc magisterial inquiry celebrates Labour victory: “L-aqwa zmien ta’ pajjizna wasal. Viva Joseph.”

Doris Serpina, deputy registrar to Magistrate Aaron Bugeja, who is leading the inquiry into the ownership of Egrant Inc, uploaded photographs on Facebook showing herself out celebrating the Labour victory on June 4, along with her boyfriend Joel Sciberras. In another Facebook post, she wrote: “L-aqwa zmien ta’ pajjizna wasal. Viva Joseph.” (The best days for country are here. Long live Joseph (Muscat).”

Joseph Muscat, the Prime Minister, is the subject of the very inquiry to the details of which she is privy. Ms Serpina is the point of contact for anybody who wishes to report information to the inquiry. She is present while witnesses speak and knows which witnesses have appointments and when, and also knows about any documents which have been produced to the inquiry.

Egrant Inc is the third company set up in Panama in tandem with the two acquired by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri in March 2013.

A former employee of Pilatus Bank, which has come under suspicion of laundering money for the ruling elites of Azerbaijan and Malta, informed this website that she had found – in a safe which the bank kept in the kitchen at the time (the presence of the safe in the kitchen has been confirmed by third parties), two documents which are declarations of trust, in the name of the Prime Minister’s wife, for ownership of shares in Egrant Inc.

Unconvincingly, and almost a year after the discovery of Egrant Inc in the Panama Papers which launched worldwide in April 2016, Brian Tonna – the accountant and fixer for the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and cabinet minister Konrad Mizzi – claimed last January that he had owned Egrant Inc all along. The Prime Minister then, equally unconvincingly, spoke about this at a political rally – causing observers to ask the obvious question as to why, if Brian Tonna had really owned the company, he did not say so at the outset.

This website emailed screenshots of the Facebook posts in question to Ms Serpina at her official government address, which is used by those who need to contact the inquiry, asking her to confirm or deny ownership of the posts celebrating the subject of the inquiry. She did not reply.

Shortly afterwards, the Doris Joel Sciberras Serpina Facebook page was taken down, and replaced by one in the sole name of Doris Serpina, stripped of all compromising material.

Meanwhile, this website is informed that after the screenshots began to circulate among lawyers and people who work at the Courts of Justice, they were brought to the attention of the inquiring magistrate, who “was very upset about it”. It has not been possible yet to find out what action was taken, if any, in this regard.