Early last year, shortly before this website revealed that he had set up secret companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand for Konrad Mizzi (the Minister for Energy), for Keith Schembri (the Prime Minister’s chief of staff), and for a third unnamed individual, their co-conspirator Brian Tonna bought a large house in London for £17 million.

The purchase was made through a company which he owns in the British Virgin Islands, Willerby Trade Inc, which he acquired in June 2013. The background details to this company are here.

Willerby Trade Inc was designed to be secret and concealed from the Maltese state authorities, with Tonna’s ownership hidden by Mossack Fonseca nominees – but his cover was blown through the worldwide release of the Panama Papers documents containing the entire cache of emails – hundreds of thousands of documents – from Mossack Fonseca’s server in Panama.

A very important point here is that Tonna is not just the accountant who made the arrangements for Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and the third individual, but their co-conspirator. He had a company set up for himself at the same time he set up companies for them. The only difference is that their companies are in Panama and his is in the British Virgin Islands.

Tonna paid for the London mansion last year through Willerby Trade Inc’s account at Pilatus Bank in Malta. He paid £5 million as a deposit, with an agreement to pay the remaining £12 million in instalments.

Pilatus Bank is a small private operation, which is owned by an Iranian with a St Kitts & Nevis passport, Seyed Ali Sadr Hasheminejad. Hasheminejad has four passports in total, with two different years of birth: 1975 and 1980.

The company applied for a Maltese banking licence after the Labour Party was elected to government in 2013.

Tonna was instrumental in pushing the application through: the Malta Financial Services Authority granted Pilatus a banking licence in August 2015. Most of its 100 or so private clients have been referred by Tonna himself, who calls regularly at the bank’s offices in Ta’ Xbiex for meetings with the CEO and another executive.

Pilatus has no banking licence granted anywhere else in the world, but the Malta Financial Services Authority had approved its passporting licence for all European Union member states.

The bank has an unmarked and completely anonymous office at 4, Old Park Lane, London, to which it never refers publicly. It can’t even be called a brass-plate or letterbox company, because there is neither on the door. There is nothing to indicate that there is a bank’s representative office or any kind of business operation within.

When this website visited yesterday afternoon, the attendant in the completely empty and anonymous reception area, which has nothing to indicate the identity of any occupiers of the building, or even that there are any occupiers at all, was unfamiliar with the name ‘Pilatus’ and said, “Oh, you mean the bank? There’s nobody there, and I can’t let you go up because all the alarms will go off. But Anna might be in tomorrow.”

This website has contacted Brian Tonna for his comment, but he has not replied. Calls made to his mobile phone were cut off. This message was sent to his mobile phone number and to his email address at Nexia BT:

Early last year, before the Panama Papers documents were published round the world, revealing that you are the UBO of a secret company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, Willerby Trade Inc, that company bought a house in London for £17 million, with £5m as a down payment and the rest to be settled in instalments. 

Daphne Caruana Galizia

Brian Tonna has since replied with the following email:

Dear Ms Caruana Galizia
 
I refer to your blog post, just uploaded, in which you assert that I acquired a property in London for ₤17m through Willerby Trade Inc.
 
Your assertion is a complete and blatant fabrication. For the record, I have never acquired, directly or indirectly, any immovable property in London.
 
Also for the record, your email to me was received at 9.50am this morning.
 
All my rights are reserved.
 
 
Brian Tonna
Managing Partner
 
Nexia BT | The Penthouse, Suite 2, Capital Business Centre, Entrance C, Triq taz-Zwejt, San Gwann SGN 3000, Malta
T: +356 2163 7778 | F: +356 2163 4383
brian.tonna@nexiabt.com | www.nexiabt.com

This website stands by its story and draws your attention to the fact that Tonna does not mention Pilatus Bank, his ownership of Willerby Trade Inc, or the fact that Willerby Trade Inc, whose ultimate beneficial owner was concealed from the Maltese authorities, has an account there.

Two days ago, the Financial Times published an article about how London’s housing crisis is caused in great part by the large-scale purchase of property through offshore companies using illicit funds. This is driving prices upwards and making them unaffordable to legitimate buyers.

“There are two good reasons why the UK should be putting up more effective barriers to the illicit funds that wash up so prodigiously on Britain’s shores,” the newspaper said. “The first relates to the UK’s credibility in the campaign against corruption.

“Successive governments have taken centre stage in the global war against this scourge. But their stance has always looked a little Janus-faced, on the one hand offering support to those battling corrupt practises in the developing world, on the other doing too little in practical terms to prevent the proceeds from ending up in Britain.

“The second reason is the nefarious effect that the laundering of ill-gotten gains is having domestically. In a recent report, Faulty Towers, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International outlines how vast sums laundered through UK property are contributing to a housing crisis, particularly in London — leading to the underuse of stock and over-heating of prices.”

Britain’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is now looking into compiling a register that would list the beneficial owners of offshore and other non-British companies which have bought real estate in the United Kingdom. There is no such register now.

The Financial Times reports that since 2004, law enforcement agencies “have identified £180m worth of property in London linked to the suspected proceeds of corruption, with 75 per cent of cases investigated involving overseas companies that obscure the real owners”.

But that is just a tiny part of the problem. Using publicly available sources, Transparency International has found that in London alone, PEPs (politically exposed persons) from different parts of the world have bought some £4.2 billion of real estate using funds from suspect origins.

For background to Brian Tonna’s Willerby Trade Inc and his involvement in the sale of Maltese citizenship and residence visas in the Middle East, read here and also here.

Joseph Muscat, the incoming Prime Minister, opens Brian Tonna’s (on left) new offices in March 2013.

The completely unmarked and anonymous office of Pilatus Bank at 4 Old Park Lane, London. This picture was taken yesterday. There was nobody present except an attendant downstairs, who didn’t know the bank by name. Pilatus has a category 2 banking licence issued by the Malta Financial Services Authority in August 2015. It does not have a banking licence anywhere else.

The company, Evergreen Travel Ltd, is now the subject of an investigation along with other companies in the Panama Papers documents that are owned by or linked to Maltese citizens.

The identity of the company’s ultimate beneficial owner/s was completely concealed by nominees until January 2014, when a significant part of the shareholding was transferred to the name of Hotel San Antonio plc (now Ltd), one of Debono’s businesses in Malta.

The rest of the shareholding is concealed by FNTC First Nominee Ltd and FNTC Second Nominee Ltd of the Isle of Man. The intermediary which set up the company and made the arrangements is First Names Group of Jersey and the Isle of Man.

Debono uses Evergreen Travel Ltd in the British Virgin Islands to invoice those who buy time-share at the Hotel San Antonio. The Panama Papers documents include a letter from a British man who wrote to Evergreen Travel at its letterbox company address, naively believing it to be an actual business address. The letter was scanned and filed by Mossack Fonseca, which is how it came to be among the documents.

In that letter, the man seeks redress on behalf of his parents, both in their 80s, who he says had their last remaining £3,000 taken off them by surprise fees for timeshare. One of them, he wrote, had dementia, and the other, cancer. They had transferred their money to an account at the Bank of Valletta. There is no record of a reply.

Hotel San Antonio Ltd was incorporated in Malta in 1966, to own and operate a small Qawra hotel. Around 35 years later, the company was bought by Seabank Hotel & Catering Ltd, which is owned by Silvio Debono (the majority shareholder) and his brothers Guido, Natalino and Raymond, and by Tony Zahra’s Alpine Ltd.

The hotel was then rebuilt on a much larger scale with financing through a 10-year bond issue in 2002, and listing on the Malta Stock Exchange as a public limited liability company, meaning that the company was now Hotel San Antonio plc rather than Ltd. In May 2012, the bonds were redeemed in full.

In December 2013, a resolution was taken to change the company’s status from public to private, so now it was Hotel San Antonio Ltd again. At that point, the authorised share capital was €10 million, with an issued share capital of €5.47 million.

Days after the change in status, Tony Zahra stepped down as director and legal and judicial representative of the company, and transferred his entire shareholding to SD Holdings Ltd. Silvio Debono, in his personal capacity, is the sole shareholder of that company.

Three weeks after the company switched status from public to private and Debono acquired all of Tony Zahra’s shareholding, shares in BVI company Evergreen Travel Ltd were transferred to the ownership of Hotel San Antonio Ltd, still inexplicably listed as plc.

Edward Scicluna was a director of the board of Hotel San Antonio plc from 2001/2002 to 31 March 2013, when he resigned two weeks after becoming Minister of Finance. He was replaced by Silvio Debono’s son, Robert, who was then 21. The British Virgin Islands arrangements were made nine months after he stepped down.

Back, left to right: Ivan Portelli, at the time Director of Operations at the VAT Department, Jonathan Attard, ‘person of trust’ in Economy Minister Christian Cardona’s secretariat, Silvio Debono, Natius Farrugia, Labour mayor of Zurrieq, unidentified.
Front: Louis Gauci (right), and Vince Micallef, Labour Party activist, former policeman and criminal lawyer, board secretary to the Malta Council for Science and Technology and company secretary to DB San Gorg Property Ltd, the vehicle which Silvio Debono is using to acquire 14 tumoli of public land at St George’s Bay.

A Place in the Sun
==================

By Frederick Obermaier and Ralf Wiegand

The fact that there is a company name on the letterbox does not mean that there is a company office inside. The company name ‘Fraport’ is by the letterbox at an address in the former fishing village of St Julian’s in Malta, and beneath, ‘No junk mail’. Fraport is the company which operates Frankfurt Airport, and it is half-owned by the federal state of Hesse and the city of Frankfurt. This address even has a doorbell. But why does Fraport have a subsidiary in Malta anyway, in St Julian’s?

The woman’s voice over the intercom speaks an edgy English and sounds very far away. She refers us to Fraport’s headquarters in Frankfurt. Would she at least tell us how many people work for Fraport in St Julian’s? “Please contact the head office in Frankfurt,” she says.

It is mainly young people from Scandinavia, Italy, Spain and Germany who come to St Julian’s, to learn English. At least, that is what they tell their parents. The party zone is notorious. In the evenings, people with braces on their teeth roam the place with beer and colourful cocktails, and in the police archives, there are reports of rape and accidents. In 2011, a 14-year-old German fell from his eighth-floor hotel room balcony, and died.

The special thing about St Julian’s is that some language schools have the same address as global corporations. For example, in the Mayfair Building, which is not far from the nightlife centre of Paceville, English is taught on the ground floor. On the fourth floor, according to doorbell panel, Puma and the German fertiliser manufacturer K + S, have an address. One floor above, there is a name-plate for Sixt Financial Services. The company shares a mailbox with Lufthansa Malta Finance. A young man opens the door, with a blank expression. He disappears, returns, and hands us a pink Post-It note with “www.basf.de, www.sixt.com” written on it. And Lufthansa? He shrugs and closes the door on us.

Letterboxes – everywhere in St Julian’s there are letterboxes. There is one for Wincor Nixdorf, another German company, in the same building where Frankfurt Airport’s operating company has an address. A blonde woman wearing a fur jacket comes up to us and asks, in a stern voice, “Is there a problem?”. “You can look for those companies as long as you want to,” she says, “but they have no office in this building.” So why the letterbox, name-plate and doorbell? The woman turns away, saying she has to give her husband a quick call. Then she walks round the corner and does not come back.

Malta is the subject of hot discussion at present. The smallest country in the European Union currently holds the EU Council Presidency. Yes, it is small, but even in terms of the German standard for smallness, the Saarland, Malta is tiny. One-eighth the size of Saarland, and with half the number of inhabitants. That means you must think of something to make yourself stand out. Malta has come up with something.

The Greens in the European Parliament recently asked, as they build a report: “Is Malta a tax haven?”. The answer was yes, a tax haven right within the European Union.

Since then, Malta has been discussing the issue. Newspapers carry opinion columns on the subject. There are surveys among experts. Since 2013, the Social Democrats of the Labour Party have governed, and before that, the Nationalist Party was at the helm. Both like to accuse each other of all sorts of things, including the moral decay in Maltese politics. But on the subject of taxes, they stick together. There are no other political parties in parliament.

Owning a yacht here is nice and also very practical: you can save on taxes

Malta operates on a system which the European Union, especially since the revelations of the Luxembourg Leaks and the Panama Papers, has announced it wants to fight against. Multinational companies are passing on profits to their Maltese subsidiaries, which then pretend to be doing business on the Mediterranean island. But in fact, all they do there is pay less tax (‘letterbox companies’).

According to calculations by the newspaper Malta Today, those European member states in which the profits were really generated lose 3.5 to 4 billion euros a year in taxes because of this system. In Malta, company tax is 35 per cent, but foreign business owners can recover more than 80 per cent of that from the Inland Revenue Department.

For the rich, Malta offers the largest shipping register in Europe – not because it has the most beautiful marinas, but because the owner of a yacht can save on taxes. It is, so to speak, the perfect combination of pleasure and benefit. Although in Malta the purchase of yachts is subject to sales tax, this can be reduced to a small amount. After all, the “unique tax model”, which lawyers there speak of, makes it possible for people to lease their own yachts to themselves. The 18% tax on yachts is reduced to as low as 5.4 per cent, the Maltese assuming that they will be used mainly outside European territory. The savings can be up to 100,000 euros.

Welcome to Malta! Or as a company cheers: “Tax-haven Malta – Vacation from the tax authority.”

Many Germans like to take a bit of tax-vacation in Malta. In the Maltese company register you can only search by company name, not by the names of directors and shareholders. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR have now also been able to search for personal names by means of leaked documents. Hidden at times by cryptic company names are German celebrities, large industrialists and billionaire heirs. The information that up to September of last year there were 1,616 Maltese companies with German shareholders can be obtained officially from the Maltese authorities on request, against a fee of 25 euros.

It can be inferred from the data provided by the Federal Ministry of Finance that only a fraction of these are known to the German authorities. Since 2010 only 266 German people have disclosed their Maltese companies to the German tax department. So there are 1,616 shareholders but only 266 declarations. Why is there no official communication about this between Berlin and Valletta? “Tax administration is fundamentally the responsibility of each country,” explains a government minister. He could not speak for Germany.

Unconditional discretion and sedated bureaucracy: that is what protects the very special holiday paradises like Malta. In an office building on the exit road from Valletta, there is Deloitte, one of the world’s most important accounting firms. The same address is also used by Ganesha Yachting Ltd, which is registered in Peter-Alexander Wacker’s name, the chairman of the supervisory board of Wacker-Chemie. The young receptionist shrugs her shoulders. “Just a moment. Please sit down.” Some phone calls later she is back. Nobody has ever heard of a Ganesha Yachting. But it’s in the Maltese company registry! “There must be a mistake.”

Even if letterbox companies do not need much – like real offices with real employees, for example – one thing they still need under Maltese law is a valid registered address.

Ganesha Yachting is just one of hundreds of Maltese companies which have German shareholders. Among them are operators of betting portals, suspected fraudsters, and also some unscrupulous celebrities, who have registered their boats there or apparently planned to do that. Many are likely to have relied on the typical promise of tax havens: low or no taxes, and your identity is as secure as your money. After all, who is expecting his discreetly registered company to become public overnight?

A well-known German television presenter, for example, owns a Maltese company – but that is, according to his lawyer’s communications with us, his private business and no one else’s. The television presenter, in any case, is “indisputably within the law.” There is no indication, in the two-page letter from his lawyer, whether the prominent client has declared his Maltese company to the German authorities.

Discretion is everything in this game, it is one of the basic techniques

Carsten Maschmeyer has often been on television lately. He is a friend of Schröder and Ferres’s husband. In The Lion’s Den he cast young entrepreneurs for Vox. It is also about getting a new image, Maschmeyer said in interviews, that is different to his image as one of Germany’s most controversial entrepreneurs. Maschmeyer confirms that he has temporarily owned as many as three Maltese companies to operate a yacht. But fiscal motives played “no role” in this, his spokesman said, and Maschmeyer has declared the companies to the German tax office.

In 2013, according to the Handelsblatt, Maschmeyer – who had presumably benefited from a reduced VAT rate on his yacht in Malta – demanded a luxury tax on yachts in his own country, saying: “There should be a special high tax on luxury goods, because that would be a fair redistribution and hit the right ones.” A little later, according to the Maltese register of companies, two of his Maltese companies were dissolved. The third had already been closed.

The spectacular corruption case involving the former and current Lord Mayors of Regensburg also centres on a yacht. Both men were apparently bribed by the building contractor, Volker Tretzel, who allegedly gave the former mayor, Hans Schaidinger, a sailing yacht among other things. Was this possibly one that belonged to Tretzel’s Maltese company, Ino Marine Services?

Tretzel’s Maltese company is registered at an address in an office building right on the harbour, with a view onto shiny yachts. If you get past the grim woman at reception, you find yourself in a corridor, where there is a door to a company called Vistra, a specialist in ship registration. A friendly employee leads the way to the managing director, and before we go in, we overhear the conversation through the door. “A journalist? What, he’s already in here? Oh, no.”

“Tretzel, yes – we manage a yacht for the gentleman,” says the man in his mid-forties, later. He is aware of the fact that the German “gentleman” is currently held on remand in a German prison on bribery charges, about a yacht among other things. “Our compliance man is working on it.” Compliance men are those who keep watch during business deals that laws are adhered to, so as not to have the authorities at their necks. The managing director says he will send us more details by e-mail, which we never receive.

“Hans Schaidinger did not use this yacht or any other yacht owned by Volker Tretzel (…),” Tretzel’s lawyer replies to our questions on the matter. His client had paid “all (sales) taxes”. He did not say whether the Maltese company has been declared to the German tax authorities.

Discretion is everything in this game, it is one of the basic techniques that all players must master. And Malta has experience in the great tax charade. Only in stormy Iceland was a government similarly deeply entangled in the Panama Papers, in those revelations from the belly of a Panamanian offshore service provider. Two of the closest confidants of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, his then health and energy minister, Konrad Mizzi, and his chief of staff, Keith Schembri, had money hidden through a web of companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand.

In Malta it was The Scandal, in the spring of 2016. The newspapers covered it like there had never been a bigger one. Thousands of citizens demonstrated outside the Office of the Prime Minister and demanded his resignation, carrying placards with the word ‘Barra’, which means ‘Out’. Muscat’s government survived a vote of confidence, but in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, Malta has fallen 10 places. It is now ranked in 47th place, its worst ever.

Anyone who, in Malta and to the Maltese, describes the country for what it is – a tax haven – shouldn’t expect applause. When Malta Today published its figures, it received harsh insults. This is a “stupid and harmful article”, one person commented on Facebook. Why would the newspaper intentionally harm the national interest? The economy of the country would collapse without this tax system. The writer of the article was pilloried, described as having “his pants down”. Another reader was puzzled: “Malta Today wtf! Are you out of your mind??”

Malta obviously lives well off the few taxes that it levies, like those of Ralf Schumacher, for example. The racing driver’s lawyer tells us that he did not set up the Maltese company which he owns, which is called Sea Dream Ltd, but bought it as the means of acquiring the yacht it owned. He bought the yacht’s Maltese holding company to buy the yacht. Schumacher undertook to continue the leasing relationship begun by the seller. And what about the savings on taxes? Life is hard.

Günter Herz, an ex-co-owner of Tchibo, is one of the richest Germans, and he has a Maltese company which owns a boat. It was set up in 2004 and is called All Smoke Yachts I Ltd.

And Peter-Alexander Wacker, who owns the letterbox company without a letterbox? He, too, has his lawyer write to us, a letter which cannot be quoted in whole or in part. He leaves unanswered the question of why no one at his company address knows of his company’s existence. It is the mystery of Malta.

Even a Hesse state-owned company is involved – for the purpose of “optimising the control position”

Malta is the most densely populated country in Europe. Most families have two cars that seem to be all on the road to Valletta at the same time. Physical distances on the island are short, but travel time is long. Two-thirds of the 430,000 islanders live in or around the capital. Valletta, a world heritage site, is an imposing fortress built from light coloured sandstone, perched on a peninsula between fjord-like sea arms. The crusaders had once erected them as a bulwark against the Ottomans. Today, signs with the wreath of twelve stars on many buildings point to EU grants. Our Lady of Victories Church, for example, Valletta’s first building: it has been restored with EU funds. Or Fort St. Elmo, the northern fortification of Valletta: it has been rehabilitated with EU funds. Also the Barrakka lift, which takes you in only 28 seconds from the Grand Harbour to the old town: co-financed by the EU.

It is a peculiar challenge when the EU subsidises and promotes a tax haven which deprives its fellow member states of tax revenue. More so when a German state-owned company like Fraport Malta Business Services Ltd, uses measures to avoid paying tax in Germany itself, using a letterbox company in Malta, that has a name-plate and a doorbell, but no employees. The Ministry of Finance in Hesse said in 2013, in response to a question from the Greens, that the Maltese company is there to “optimise our tax position”, because corporation tax can be minimised in Malta. When even German state-owned companies are involved in this, it is possible to understand why a loophole like Malta is so difficult to close.

Since 2014, the Valletta government has even been offering EU passports for sale. Anyone who invests about one million euros in the island state can become a citizen – and does not even have to live there. The European Parliament thundered that EU citizenship should not be “for sale at any price”, but it could not do anything about it. Citizenship is the responsibility of individual member states. Like all EU citizens, those who hold a Maltese passport may travel, reside and work freely in the Schengen area, a freedom of movement which can also be helpful in the circumvention of sanctions or anti-money-laundering laws. Meanwhile, through this “individual investor programme”, which is one of the favourite projects of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, Malta has welcomed hundreds of new citizens, most of them from Russia, China and the Middle East.

Obviously, it is not only economic refugees who enter the EU via the Mediterranean. The rich also travel – however, not by dinghy.

Collaboration: Catharina Felke

In that presentation one year ago, which you can read here, VGH falsely presented itself to the Omanis as being a “proven healthcare PPP/management/capital group, currently underway with 800 bed expansion of Malta healthcare system along with development of Barts London School of Medicine and Dentistry Gozo Branch”.

Coelho’s 3G Global Healthcare is yet another shell company, registered in the ‘letterbox company’ jurisdiction of Delaware in the United States.

Godfrey Coelho of Mumbai, who represented Vitals Global Healthcare in a presentation in Oman in October last year.

The piece is translated beneath.

MALTA’S HEALTH MINISTER UNMASKED

Berlin – One of the ‘power players’ in the Panama Papers is Malta’s Health Minister, Dr. Konrad Mizzi, who is involved in transactions with shell companies in Panama. This has been revealed through leaked documents that have been evaluated by numerous journalists. Mizzi is accused of having put his money in offshore companies using the services of Mossack Fonseca.

In February, Mizzi had been reported to have been involved in a Panama-registered letterbox company, and after an examination by the tax authorities he decided that the company, which is designed for anonymity, should be dissolved. He will keep his trust in New Zealand, which owns the offshore company. Mizzi and his family are among the beneficiaries of the trust.

The politician is currently a Member of Parliament and Minister of Health and Energy. In 2013 he was elected to parliament and since February he is deputy party chairman of the ruling Labour Party. As a representative of the Republic of Malta, Mizzi typically takes part in meetings of the Council of the European Union. He also managed large projects in the energy and telecommunications sector in Malta and the UK.

Millions of documents related to shell companies in tax havens have been revealed in the Panama Papers. The companies were set up by the law firm Mossack Fonseca, managed and sold through middlemen. The revelations have caused a lot of excitement in recent days: numerous celebrities, politicians, former and current leaders and sports officials are among the clients of the firm.

In any marital relationship that is still functioning, no matter how poorly and no matter how great the tensions between the two, basic decency dictates some support in the form of a physical presence – or at least the show of support.

But despite having paid first-class tickets between Malta and China built into her contract agreement, Mrs Mizzi has stayed determinedly away during the worst of her purported husband’s hell. She was not even in Malta and standing at his side in his supposed moment of glory, when he was elected the Labour Party’s deputy leader with 96% of the delegates’ vote.

What should have been his triumph was sabotaged by the revelation that he secretively set up money-laundering structures in Panama, unbeknown to his cabinet colleagues except for the Prime Minister and his chief of staff. Because they were stunned and upset, Mizzi was left to face the cameras and the press alone when his election was announced.

Deserted by his cabinet colleagues and the party big cheeses, who didn’t want to picked up in the camera-frame standing behind him or next to him, Minister Mizzi should have had his wife there at his side at the very least.

This is particularly so given that he brought up the subject of her with the journalists who surrounded him that night. It was a token sop to the public on a really bad night, the general gist being: ‘I may have opened up a company in Panama and shocked you all, but hey, I’ve spoken to Sai and we decided that she will not renew her contract so you can stop fussing about those 13,000 euros a month she’s taking from the public purse.’

The reporters there that night were probably too shell-shocked by the developing scandal to ask the obvious questions: “It’s not for you to make that announcement, is it? It’s for her employer – the Minister of the Economy (Malta Enterprise) or is it the Foreign Minister (consul)?” and “Will Mrs Mizzi be returning to Malta when her contract expires in August?”

I can answer the last one through the experience of life: no, she won’t be coming back. When she left, she left. When a woman packs up her belongings, her children, leaves the marital home, and moves lock, stock and barrel across the world back to her home in China, leaving her husband behind, she doesn’t do it for a job or for her career. She does it because she’s left her husband and wants to put as much distance between them as possible. She does it because she is so very sick of the situation that she no longer cares that her children will be raised without a father.

There wasn’t even a marital home to leave at the time because Konrad and Sai Mizzi and their children had left the substandard flat in Fgura – where this supposed daughter of a Chinese gadzillionaire (what a laugh) had been living – already in the spring of 2013. At the time, they were living in flat 4, Marina Court, near the Hotel Fortina on Tigne Sea Front, which had been loaned to them free of charge by the elderly and rabidly Labour business operator Joe Debono. (Given that Joe Debono is a very common name, some of my readers will know exactly who I mean when I say that he has been Gladys Borda’s companion for many years.)

They lived in this free gift of a loaned flat from a businessman (and this when they made such a scene about Joe Cassar and his ‘favours’ from Joe Gaffarena) while another flat – at 4, Avril Court, a few doors further along the sea front – was refurbished for them.

That flat, too, was owned by Debono and his name remains on the letterbox to this day as photographs I uploaded last month show. The businessman Joe Debono, who is very close to Konrad Mizzi, may well still own the flat at Avril Court where Konrad Mizzi lives now or have ‘donated’ it to the cabinet minister in return for something of which the public knows nothing.

When the cabinet minister moved from 4, Marina Court to 4, Avril Court in the summer of 2013, the cabinet minister’s wife moved directly to Shanghai. And that was that.

I think it’s time they all stopped pretending. And we, the public, have to watch out for what happens next – because it stands to reason that if Mrs Mizzi’s contract with Maltese Enterprise, which weirdly makes her a consul under the Foreign Ministry even though her contract is with the Ministry for the Economy, is not going to be renewed, and she will remain in Shanghai regardless, then they are going to have to find some way of paying her in another form.

The Minister of Health and Energy and Malta Enterprise’s woman in Shanghai, Sai Liang MIzzi, with Han Bin, managing director of Chinese-government-owned Leisure Clothing Ltd, which abuses Chinese, North Korean and Vietnamese indentured labourers on Maltese soil.

This is poverty: an American family living in their car

Many years ago I was in Paris and rang a woman I had known in Malta when she worked at the French embassy here. We went to a street music festival, walked around and stopped for a drink.

An hour later, all walked out, I suggested we stop for another one. “I’d better not,” she said. “If I buy another drink I’ll mess up my budget and have to eat into my rent money.”

I was taken aback.

I was far from rolling in it myself, what with three small children and bills pouring in from all directions. But you know how it is in Malta: when you’re out for a drink and somebody suggests a second round, and a third, perhaps even a fourth, nobody says “I’d better not. My rent money/loan repayment/electricity bill is due and I don’t want to mess up my budget.” Not when you’re past those early years of scrabbling around when everyone you know is in the same boat and admitting to it isn’t tantamount to public mortification.

I thought about this a couple of days ago, when the finance minister released the figures for amounts due to Enemalta (€200 million) and the number of households and businesses where the electricity supply had been cut off because bills had not been paid (2,438). The Water Services Corporation, he said, is owed €55.1 million.

Meanwhile, the director of Caritas Malta has called for a redefinition of poverty and an increase in the mandatory minimum wage. He said that utilities bills, medicines, gas and rent are pushing people into poverty.

Monsignor Victor Grech sees poverty-related problems every day of his working life, but I cannot agree with him here. The present government cannot possibly be more socialist and left-wing in its approach to social services and the welfare state.

Other Nationalist governments since 1987 have been even more extreme – more socialist than the socialists, who in our experience of them between 1971 and 1987 proved to be anything but, their solution being to bring down the rich rather than to better the lot of the poor.

We have free education all the way up to tertiary level. Anyone who stays in education beyond the state-mandated age of 16 is paid a stipend.

We have free medical care and a spanking new general hospital that beats private treatment and rivals the conditions in private hospitals. There is no means testing. Those with chronic conditions get their medicines free.

There are welfare payments for just about any reason under the sun that renders a person unable to work and support himself, herself and dependent children – a system so lax that it is abused and subject to countless cases of fraud.

There are so many jobs going at the level where those at risk of poverty are most likely to seek work that employers are resorting to refugee workers to fill them. The poor Maltese are just not interested.

What more do people want?

Those who get the most in terms of welfare payments, free schooling, medical care and the rest are the very ones who contribute nothing towards the system at all, because they fall below the tax threshold.

If I read the situation correctly, they want to be paid to live without working, without cutting down, and without making do. They’ll go about their daily business while those who work pay tax so that the rest can get a cheque through the post as a reward for not making an effort.

Nobody in the real world expects to run a car, heat a home, consume electricity, and feed and clothe a family of five off the pay-cheque of one man in a low-level job, however high the minimum wage might be. They don’t expect to do this even off the decent salary of somebody in a mid-level job.

Nobody in the real world would even think of starting a family on the minimum wage, still less one minimum wage. Nobody in the real world would pop out two, three or four children as though contraception doesn’t exist and God will provide when the parents can’t, when they cannot even afford to support one child.

And now here’s the big one.

Women in the real world go to work and help pay the household bills. They do not live in a parallel universe called Malta, where the wife of a middle manager, still less the wife of a labourer on the minimum wage or just above it, expects to stay at home raising children – or worse still, not raising them because they’re in their teens – while taxes are creamed off others to pay for the electricity, water, rent, gas, medical care and children’s schooling that these women demand.

It’s the expectation and the sense of entitlement that shocks me.

There’s no budgeting, then the electricity bill plops through the letterbox and oh-my-god we don’t have the money to pay it. Husband earns the minimum wage and we can’t get by? What do you mean, stop having babies? How dare you suggest that I get a job? You have a nerve to say that we shouldn’t have married and started a family on €250 a week. Why shouldn’t five people be able to live on €250 a week? The state should help us.

If you think this reasoning is fictitious, you’re wrong. This is exactly how people think. Some of them actually expect to raise a family of five in comfort on €150 a week. They’re already getting practically everything for free and still they want more. The solution – living off two wages or salaries instead of just one; not having children they can’t support financially; paying their rent and utilities bills before they even think of paying for anything else – just doesn’t seem to occur to them.

And while good-hearts like Monsignor Victor Grech are genuinely concerned, they are concerned about entirely the wrong problem.

That problem is the fact that Maltese people do not live in the real world. Accustomed to getting almost everything free, to electricity and water bills that don’t reflect the costs involved, to paying peanuts for rent as protected tenants, to a bubble in which women don’t work and men are the sole breadwinners, we have parted company with reality.

This article is published today in The Malta Independent.