BREAKING/HSBC Bank to foreclose on Delia company €7.2 million after interest-free 18 months if debt is not paid

Whether he has a nine per cent shareholding or 99% is completely irrelevant. The fact is that HSBC Bank, through the deed of constitution of debt signed last month and which Dr Delia hoped to keep hidden, has bound both him and his wife over as sureties in their PERSONAL capacity – that means not as company shareholders – for the entire amount of €7.2 million.

Their fellow shareholders, including Dr Delia’s law firm partner Georg Sapiano and his wife Audrey, are also bound over in their personal capacity for the entire amount. The bank will simply decide from whom to get the money: it can go after all of them, or it can go after one of them for the whole amount. It is entirely up to HSBC Bank and not up to Dr Delia.

I have also discovered why they are not paying interest on the money they owe the bank, as Dr Delia claims here, and why he told me that the flats will be sold “within 18 months”, which I thought was an absurd goal and statement.

They have to sell those remaining flats – around 15 of them – at Mgarr in Gozo because HSBC Bank has given them 18 months from the signing of the constitution of debt at the end of last month – which means that they now have 17 months left – in which to come up with the full amount of €7.2 million, failing which the bank will foreclose and begin seizing assets. The bank does not need to go to court to get a judgement so as to do that, because it can do so on the basis of the constitution of debt deed alone.

Meanwhile, the bank has agreed not to levy interest – which would otherwise ratchet up at around €1,600 a day – for the entire 18 months. But after that, if they haven’t got the €7.2 million, they are toast.

For background, the deed of constitution of debt is published here.

So if Dr Delia is elected Nationalist Party leader, Malta is going to have an Opposition leader who spends the first year and a half panicking about how to raise €7.2 million with his mates and how to sell flats that nobody seems to want to buy at the price they need to sell them to cover their backsides. And then we might even have an Opposition leader who is fighting off bank foreclosure to the tune of €7.2 million.

Malta is MAD. But I look at the United States and console myself.

And I see that now he is not even referring to me as “Caruana Galizia” (peasant manners) but as “DCG”, which is a hundred times worse. Breeding, as they say, will out – invariably.