Central Bank deputy governor’s insurance company set to go bust: in talks with Middlesea for rescue bid

Allcare Insurance Ltd, the insurance company (as distinct from Allcare Insurance Brokers Ltd, which is a brokerage) is set to go bust and is in emergency talks with Middlesea Insurance for a rescue buy-out.

I am told that the chief financial officer submitted his resignation today and that other senior staff also left this week.

Allcare Insurance Ltd is owned by Alfred Mifsud, who last week was appointed deputy governor of the Central Bank of Malta, and Eric Schembri. Simon Schembri, Eric’s son, is managing director.

The company insures the Labour Party and its broadcasting operation, One Productions.

It published a disastrous set of accounts last July, which clearly showed the lie of the land and what was up ahead, but because publication in a newspaper is required by law, the company chose a ‘dead’ day when those accounts got little attention outside the field of financial services and no attention from journalists except on this website, where my pieces about the subject were taken to be politically motivated and therefore “not credible”.

The fact that Alfred Mifsud owns the company (along with Eric Schembri) does not make for political motivation but for a news story, particularly given that he was touted to become, and now is, deputy governor – and eventually governor – of the Central Bank of Malta.

I have written extensively about this subject, covering many aspects of it (to bring up the backstory, just enter keywords in the search box), including how Eric Schembri and Alfred Mifsud came to own Allcare Insurance Ltd with the help of – give a wild guess – John Dalli.

Dalli is a hidden investor in Eric Schembri’s and Alfred Mifsud’s other company, Crystal Finance Ltd, on the board of which he is represented by his daughter Claire Gauci Borda, and it is likely that he has some concealed investment in Allcare Insurance Ltd too, particularly given how Mifsud and Schembri came to own it thanks to him.

Back in the early 1990s, when John Dalli was Minister of Economic Affairs and later Finance Minister, he appointed Eric Schembri chairman of the government-owned Mediterranean Insurance Brokers (MIB) and Mediterranean Underwriting Managers (MUM).

Within a couple of years, Finance Minister Dalli and MIB/MUM chairman Schembri decided that both companies should be privatised because it wasn’t profitable for the government to keep them on. Mediterranean Insurance Brokers was sold on, but the chairman bought Mediterranean Underwriting Managers himself along with John Dalli’s consulting colleague at the Tumas Group, Alfred Mifsud, and some shareholding input from Dalli’s and Mifsud’s client, the Tumas Group itself.

This would, of course, be considered shocking abuse in a civilised democracy, but Malta is neither of those things.

They changed the company name to Allcare Insurance Agency Ltd. In 2012 it became an insurance company, rather than remaining an insurance agency, and the name changed again, to Allcare Insurance Ltd.

It is now on the verge of bankruptcy and about to be bought out by Middlesea.

Allcare Insurance Ltd owner and deputy governor of the Central Bank of Malta, Alfred Mifsud

Eric Schembri, co-owner of Allcare Insurance Ltd with Alfred Mifsud

Disgraced former European Commissioner John Dalli, who has been accused by US investors of defrauding them with the assistance of his daughter Claire Gauci Borda – it was through his agency, when he was Finance Minister in the 1990s, that Eric Schembri and Alfred Mifsud acquired the state-owned insurance company that became Allcare Insurance Ltd. Mifsud and Dalli both consulted for the Tumas Group. Schembri was chairman of the state company he bought. The likelihood that Dalli has a concealed stake in the venture he made possible when he was Finance Minister is not to be discounted.