No, a lawyer (or anyone else) can’t open a bank account for a client in his own name
Just to clear up the misinformation that’s being put about by Deliar’s gang, who are claiming that a lawyer can open a bank account for a client in his own name.
No, a lawyer can’t do that. This would be obvious, if people were not so stupid and unable to rationalise basic information. If your name is on a bank account, then it’s yours. The bank knows you, you are the holder of the account, you are responsible for the contents and the transactions, and the law knows only you.
A CLIENT account is not a CLIENT’S account. The name ‘client account’ means absolutely nothing and has no status at law. It is simply a designation that lawyers, notaries, accountants or any kind of consultant under the sun will use for a separate bank account he opens in his own name but in which he deposits any money he needs to pass on to his client, for example from the sale of a client’s house, or pass on to a third party on behalf of a client. That’s all. It is not the client’s account. It is the lawyer’s account.
In the case under review, we are looking at personal bank account carrying the name of ADRIAN DELIA, at Barclays International in Jersey, through which money was process for a prostitution racket.
Deliar insists that he opened the account to service a client (and this after he denied categorically that he had any such account). Nobody is doubting that. That is, in fact, the crux of my reports: that he allowed his offshore account in Jersey to be used for the processing of money from a prostitution racket, but kept the money instead – or sent it somewhere he shouldn’t have – and ended up being chased by for the money by Emanuel Bajada, who had paid around £1 million into Deliar’s Jersey bank account.
Just a year after Emanuel Bajada began chasing Adrian Deliar for the money that had gone mysteriously missing, he was arrested and charged in Malta. Bajada could have nailed Delia at that point and any point during his trial, by informing the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit and the police that he had deposited £1 million from Soho prostitution into the Jersey bank account of a Maltese lawyer, Adrian Delia.
But he didn’t. It would only have compounded his own problems – and that is the only reason that Deliar didn’t go to jail and lose his warrant. But he has been living with this thing hanging over him ever since, and now he has been insane and amoral enough to stand for election to the Nationalist Party leadership, even though he knows that Chris Cardona – given his role as Emanuel Bajada’s defence counsel in the Maltese trial, and his special aide Mark Barbara’s temporary fronting on the ownership of 52 Greek Street in Soho – will have known everything.
The new leader of the Opposition: two cucumber slices, a plastic hat, a face-mask and an offshore account in Jersey used to launder the proceeds from a prostitution racket. What’s not to like?