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Posted by Misha

Around Easter, Daphne made some serious allegations against Pilatus Bank. On the basis of those allegations alone, the Malta Financial Services Authority, in its role as the banking regulator, should have visited Pilatus Bank for a compliance visit.

The regulator is empowered to do so by the Malta Financial Services Authority Act which also empowers it to turn up without notice if it deems that evidence may be tampered with.

The MFSA has an in-house money laundering unit which normally also visits licence holders to carry out anti money laundering compliance visits.

The Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit may also visit any subject persons falling under its remit. These crucial compliance visits were not carried out when they should have. Any compromising evidence that may have existed has long been destroyed.

Also sending a police officer and a magistrate to review the affairs of Pilatus Bank is like asking your mechanic to perform open heart surgery on you.

I do not believe that the police or the magistrate have the required technical knowledge and tools to carry out the required searches and reviews.

Both the MFSA and the FIAU have such technical knowledge and resources. It therefore baffles me how the regulators were not at Pilatus Bank on Easter Monday.

It is the responsibility of the various regulators and if necessary the police to carry out time sensitive visits when serious and specific allegations on a licence holder are made.

I have my doubts whether any investigations carried out after Thursday evening shall be fruitful since there has been ample time to destroy or fabricate evidence. Persons working in the financial services industry can corroborate this.

One final point to be noted is that any original documents relating to Egrant Inc or documents which can be autenticated would normally be in the hands of the service providers (Mossack Fonseca and Nexia BT) and the ultimate beneficial owner/s of the company, whoever that may be.

In either case, it is not in the interest of the aforementioned parties to make such authenticated documents public.