Adrian Delia/Mark Barbara/Chris Cardona/Soho brothels: there’s much more to this story still to be reported

Reports have reached me that Adrian Delia’s campaign team have been ringing round Nationalist Party councillors between yesterday and today, urging them to vote today – the session reserved for early voting for those who can’t vote the following Saturday – because they are worried that more will be revealed in this Soho brothels story.

Yes, there is more to be revealed because the story is lot bigger than has been reported already. But the reporting of news stories should not be dictated by political agendas. I am still working on pulling the details together, and quite frankly, the story has so many component parts that it can’t be reported all at once because it is just too much to absorb. It has to be understood in its component parts, separately, in instalments.

There is a detail which perhaps many of you will not have picked up even though it was embedded in the general story though some of you will have done the arithmetic and drawn the obvious conclusion. Adrian Delia was born in 1969. The solicitors’ letter below was written at the end of 2003, and it says that the “rent” from the London properties had been paid into Delia’s Barclays International bank account in Jersey over the past three or four years.

This means that at 29, Delia already had that offshore bank account. Now those of you who have had to deal with such things will know exactly how great the likelihood was of Barclays International agreeing to open an offshore account in Jersey for a Maltese lawyer in his late 20s who had just been working for five years or so and who had no money to speak of. You can’t open a bank account in Jersey, when you’re a citizen of Malta and living in Malta, with Konrad Mizzi’s proverbial $92.

Delia is right when he says that he opened that offshore account in Jersey for “clients”, but that does not make it a client account. A client account is just a bank account in which lawyers, accountants, notaries and so on deposit money that comes from transactions and which must be passed on to their clients or on behalf of their clients. It is just an administrative tool by which professionals and others avoid mixing their own money with money that isn’t theirs and which has to be paid on. It’s done to avoid confusion in accounting and nothing else.

When a lawyer conspires with his clients to open an offshore account in a jurisdiction like Jersey, in his name, so that those clients have somewhere to park their money from illegal sources temporarily before processing it on to other bank accounts held in the name of companies incorporated in the ultra-secretive Marshall Islands – a system called ‘layering’ – that is not a client account. That is the crime of money-laundering.