Former senior executive at HSBC: “Brian Tonna’s excuse is downright ludicrous.”

A former senior executive at HSBC Bank Malta has informed me as follows, in response to Brian Tonna’s and Karl Cini’s excuse, issued through Nexia BT’s lawyer, that HSBC Bank “might have used incorrect stationery”:

“There’s no stationery that’s specific to a branch. It’s all in the form of templates and one just selects the pertinent address prior to printing. The Attard branch had been closed 15 months prior to the issue of the info reports, which means that the address of this branch would have been removed from template addresses. In other words, Tonna’s and Cini’s explanation is downright ludicrous.”

See below – the information reports for the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and his managing director, both politically exposed persons, appear to be issued in May 2013 by the Attard branch which had closed in February 2012. The information report for Adrian Hillman, who was not considered a PEP at that stage as his relationship with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was unknown, is issued as standard from the bank’s central office in Qormi.