Donny Lalonde: another example of the “talent” that has washed up on Malta

You really must read this big CNC piece, published today. The same story is carried in the Toronto Star, which is part of the same media group.

Donny Lalonde, who is Canadian, was a famous boxer in North American in the 1980s. Then he went into real estate development in the 1990s, sucked up a lot of investors’ money, was declared bankrupt by the courts in British Columbia (discharged in 2005), and left for Costa Rica, where he did exactly the same thing, only this time he set up 30+ companies there and left an even bigger string of creditors.

And last year, he washed up in Malta, where he now lives and where, I suspect, he is among the “international talent” of which the Prime Minister spoke when he defended his sale-of-Maltese-citizenship scheme. For what else would this man be doing here, if not sitting around waiting for his Maltese citizenship – unless he has got it already.

That’s a point which the CBC interviewers missed out on – why Malta. He became a point of interest to them because his name appears “hundreds of times” in the Panama Papers, and resuscitated Lalonde as a news story back in Canada. Despite being a discharged bankrupt back in Canada and fleeing considerable debts in Costa Rica that are the result of his fraudulent land development projects that never happened, he appears to have very large sums of money hidden through companies in offshore jurisdictions, having used the services of Mossack Fonseca to set them up.

And now Lalonde has found refuge in Malta. I think the Opposition and the press here really need to chase Identity Malta about this. The level of secrecy under which they have committed themselves to operate is literally designed to attract crooks to this country. As if we haven’t got enough of our own already.

Donny Lalonde