Sergei
Skripal and Maltese journalist Caruana Galizia both investigating
Cambridge Analytica/SCL
Both
Sergei and Yulia Skripal have connections with Malta
Russian
whistleblower – and Caruana contact – Maria Efimova handed
herself in to Greek police on hearing of Skripal attack, in spite of
warrants for her arrest and risk of extradition
Cambridge
Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie claims predecessor
poisoned in Kenya
Govt
claim that Russia is only plausible
suspect doesn’t stand up
The
Establishment and its media estate continue
to performcontortions to defend the lying Foreign
Secretary Boris Johnson.
These
contortions have even gone as far as stretching years-old ‘news’
to claim that the government has identified the
specific laboratory where
the Salisbury toxin – which according to
Cornell University chemistry professor David Collum is so simple that
any number of commercial labs could make it – was produced.
However,
the consensus – and the government’s line – has been that
Russia had the most reason to attack Sergei Skripal.
Work
to clear up the Salisbury toxin
That
has already been challenged, with Irish newspapers in particular
pointing out that, having exchanged Skripal
with the UK in return for its own agents, Russia might stand to lose
out on future exchanges if it targeted the subject of a previous one.
But
on balance the lack of solid evidence pointing to Russia hasn’t
meant they weren’t the most likely suspects.
Daphne
Caruana Galizia
Journalist
Daphne Caruana Galizia and the scene of her murder
However,
it shouldn’t pass without comment that Maltese journalist Daphne
Caruana Galizia – murdered by
a car bomb – is known to
have been investigatingCambridge
Analytica,
the firm at the centre of the huge Facebook data scandal and exposed
by Channel 4 News discussing dirty tricks to swing election campaigns
– as Labour MP Ben Bradshaw raised in
a Commons debate. She was also investigating its parent company SCL.
Caruana
Galizia also had connections to another Russian, whistleblower and
alleged embezzler Maria
Efimova –
who handedherself
over to Greek police after hearing about the Salisbury poisoning,
in spite of warrants outstanding for her arrest. Maltese media had
even claimed that
Efimova was Caruana Galizia’s source for information on a company
she was investigating.
Meanwhile,
Skripal – today said to making a ‘shock recovery’ a day after
his daughter told a Russian relative, during a recorded phone call,
that he was on the mend – was alsosaid by
a source close to the Russian to have been investigating… Cambridge
Analytica.
In
addition, Skripal – before his arrest and conviction in Russia for
betraying secrets to the UK intelligence services – was on long
term assignment in
Spain and… Malta –
where his daughter Yulia is also known to
have spent time.
Sergei
Skripal
In
a further interesting coincidence, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower
Christopher Wylie has claimed that his predecessor was poisoned in a
Kenyan hotel and that local police were bribed not to investigate.
None
of these things mean, of course, that Russia couldn’t be the
culprit in the Salisbury attack or that Cambridge Analytica has any
connection to the the deaths.
But
they certainly do mean that while Russia may still be the primary
suspect, the government’s ‘Russia is the only plausible suspect‘
line doesn’t stand up to even a few quick Google searches.
The
son of an investigative journalist killed in a car bomb attack in
Malta has denounced what he called the country's "mafia state".
Daphne
Caruana Galizia, 53, died in an explosion shortly after she left her
home in Bidnija, near Mosta, on Monday.
Daphne
Caruana Galizia, 53, died in an explosion shortly after she left her
home in Bidnija, near Mosta. Photo: supplied
She
was known for her blog accusing top politicians of corruption.
"My
mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and
those who sought to violate it," said her son Matthew, who was
close to the blast.
In
a lengthy Facebook post published hours after he attempted to save
his mother from the burning vehicle, he accused Maltese police of
incompetence and the government of "impunity".
"When
the institutions of the state are incapacitated, the last person left
standing is often a journalist," wrote Matthew Caruana Galizia,
who is also a journalist.
He
also took aim at Malta's projected image as a liberal Western nation.
"Yes,
this is where we are: a mafia state where you can now change your
gender on your ID card (thank god for that!) but where you will be
blown to pieces for exercising your basic freedoms," he said.
A
government spokesman, Kurt Farrugia, denied the government operated
with impunity, and promised a "very tough" and thorough
investigation.
Panama
Papers
Daphne
Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of the government and effectively
triggered an early election this year by publishing allegations
linking Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to the Panama Papers scandal.
Mr
Muscat and his wife denied claims they used secret offshore bank
accounts to hide payments from Azerbaijan's ruling family - and he
was returned to power in the election, despite the controversy.
Caruana
Galizia's popular blog had also targeted opposition politicians,
calling the country's political situation "desperate" in
her final post.
After
her death, Mr Muscat denounced the killing, calling it an attack "on
the freedom of expression in our country."
In
other developments:
Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange offered a €20,000 ($NZ33,000) reward for
information leading to a conviction.
European
Commission condemned the murder, calling her "a pioneer of
investigative journalism in Malta".
The Malta
Independent says that a magistrate assigned to the case
requested it be taken up by someone else, because she had been the
target of Caruana Galizia's writing in the past.
The Times
of Malta reports that a police officer who celebrated Ms
Galizia's murder in a post on Facebook has been suspended and is
under investigation.
In
his statement, Matthew Caruana Galizia said he would never forget
"running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a
way to open the door".
"This
was no ordinary murder and it was not tragic. Tragic is someone being
run over by a bus. When there is blood and fire all around you,
that's war," he wrote.
He
is a developer and data journalist at the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists.
The
organisation, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year for its work on
the Panama Papers, said it was shocked by Caruana Galizia's death,
and "deeply concerned about freedom of the press in Malta".
Police
have opened a murder inquiry and Malta has asked for international
assistance - including from the FBI - with the investigation.
-
BBC
Sibel Edmonds reveals that there is far more involved in this than just money laundering and the Panama Papers.
It's
like having a warm bath, the sea around Malta is an astonishing 30+
deg C, nearly 90 deg F and will be harming marine animals.
If the
sea was not particularly refreshing this weekend, it is no wonder:
the surface sea temperature reached a staggering 30.1°C, according
to the Physical Oceanography Research Group at the University of
Malta.
Coordinator Aldo Drago said that the surface sea
temperature was high all around the Maltese Islands, reaching values
well beyond 29°C and peaking up to 30.1°C in the coastal stretch
of sea opposite Marsascala on Saturday in the early evening.
Sea
temperatures in shallower areas, ports, bays and beaches were even
higher. The sea temperature measured at 3m depth in a yacht
marina on the eastern coast reached close to 31°C.
The highest
sea temperatures are typically reached in early August each year,
but are 2°C cooler than the recent values.
Prof. Drago said that
the mean sea surface temperature (SST) in coastal waters has been
steadily increasing at a hefty average rate of close to 0.05°C per
year since the late 1970s.
The Physical Oceanography Research
Group at the Department of Geosciences produces maps of SST around
the Maltese islands as it changes during the day.
These maps show
how the sea temperatures change from place to place as well as in
time, rising to highest values in late afternoon when the sea has
accumulated the sun's radiation during the day, and cooling down by
around 2°C during the night when the sea surface re-radiates part
of its acquired heat energy back to the atmosphere.
When
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key flew into Malta for the
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November 2015, he already
knew he shared some important views with his host, Malta's Prime
Minister Joseph Muscat, about the importance of keeping the tax
secrets of foreign investors.
Both
countries are quiet achievers in the ranks of global tax havens, and
both are determined to keep it that way.
While
Malta has been fiercely resisting pressure to close tax avoidance
loopholes used by foreign companies, including Australian firms, to
move profits out of the European Union, New Zealand has fought just
as hard to protect its laws that make foreign profits tax-free and
invisible for beneficiaries of its offshore trusts.
But
what Key didn't know, as he and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull mingled with Muscat at CHOGM, was how deep those
links really ran.
Just
weeks earlier, Muscat's chief-of-staff, Keith Schembri, and
Malta's energy minister, Konrad Mizzi, had used New Zealand's secrecy
laws to set up two offshore trusts. These were to be linked
to a secret Dubai bank account and to two Panama
companies that Schembri and Mizzi had set up in 2013
through a Panamanian law firm.
The
revelation of the New Zealand trusts has triggered ongoing
crisis for Muscat's government, but it also increases pressure on New
Zealand to tighten its tax loophole for foreign trusts.
New
Zealand's 12,000-plus offshore trusts pay no New Zealand
tax on foreign earnings. Their beneficiaries are not registered
and their accounts are not filed with any public body. New
Zealand regulators may demand this information, but it is not
disclosed to foreign governments.
Details
of the Malta controversy, and its New Zealand connections, have
emerged from 11.5 million tax haven records obtained by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the
German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and
more than 100 other media partners worldwide.
The
common thread is a Panamanian law firm with
considerable influence in the Pacific, Mossack Fonseca.
In
1996 Mossack Fonseca won a 20-year exclusive
right to operate offshore companies in the tiny island state of
Niue, 2000 km north-east of New Zealand, with a population of 1190.
The Panamanian firm even wrote the Niue legislation.
When
international pressure forced the closure of the Niue business in
2004, Mossack Fonseca moved its client companies to
Samoa, but its links to New Zealand remained strong.
Malta's own corporate
structures are used by a range of Australian companies to
minimise tax, as previously revealed by The Australian
Financial Review.
Italian
Premier Matteo Renzi, right, and Maltese Premier Joseph
Muscat. AP
They
include Macquarie Group, which interposed two Malta subsidiaries
between Luxembourg and Bermuda operations, after Macquarie acquired
Lend Lease Global Properties.
In
2015, Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ian Narev was
questioned at the Senate banking inquiry about the
disproportionately large number of loans written by
the small number of staff in the bank's Malta
subsidiary, and about the low level of tax paid there.
Narev said
the subsidiary was located in Malta solely because the bank needed
a position in Europe to write loans for European clients.
But
the release of tax haven records through the
ICIJ underline the ease with which even foreign
politicians can use New Zealand to hide their wealth.
In
February 2016, as Malta's Prime Minister Muscat again said Malta
would resist European Community pressure to share tax information,
his energy minister Mizzi confirmed reports that he had set up a
trust in New Zealand.
Mizzi
said the Rotorua Trust, which is operated by a Mossack Fonseca
trustee company, Orion Trust (New Zealand) Limited, had no funds
and owned only a shell company in Panama, Hearnville Inc, that
had never been used.
"This
may be used in the future to hold my existing property and
possibly investments. Currently the trust does not have any bank
accounts," he said. "The trust was set up for
long-term family asset management and inheritance.
"The
trust is regulated and registered in New Zealand, a stable
parliamentary democracy that is one of the world's most well-governed
nations, having ranked in the top tier of indexes on the strength of
its democratic institutions, government transparency and lack of
corruption."
The
Mossack Fonseca documents tell a more complicated tale. They show
that the PM's chief-of-staff Schrembri used a Spanish
adviser to set up a British Virgin Islands company, Colson Services
Ltd, for him in January 2011.
On
the same day, a second BVI company, Selson Holding Corporation, was
set up for Malcolm Scerri, the managing director of Schrembri's
Maltese company, Kasco Limited.
Four
months later, on May 10, 2011, Adrian Hillman, the managing director
of Malta's major newspaper company, Progress Press, set up a third
BVI company, Lester Holdings Group Limited, through the same
Spanish intermediary.
Last
month Hillman resigned after claims by a Maltese blogger, Daphne
Caruana Galizia, that Schembri had made payments to Hillman's BVI
company as an inducement for Progress Press to buy newsprint
from his firm Kasco.
Hillman
and Schembri both deny the allegations.
In
August 2013, Mossack Fonseca set up two Panama companies,
Hearnville Inc and Tillgate Inc, which outwardly were owned and
controlled by a Mossack Fonseca firm, ATC Administrators
Inc.
But
in reality Hearnville was controlled by Malta's energy
minister, Mizzi, and Tillgate by the PM's chief of
staff, Schembri.
The
two companies were dormant until June 2015, when Mossack Fonseca in
New Zealand set up the Rotorua Trust for Mizzi and the Haast Trust
for Schembri, with ownership of the two Panama companies transferred
to the trusts.
As
foreign trusts operated by trustee company Orion Trust (News Zealand)
Limited, Rotorua and Haast face no tax scrutiny in New Zealand
of any Panama income.
By
August 8, the Mossack Fonseca franchise firm in Malta, which acts for
Mizzi and Schembri, was writing to Mossack Fonseca Panama:
"We are in the process of opening a bank account in Dubai for
two of our Panama companies."
The
unnamed bank was asking for full documentation for Hearnville and
Tillgate, including the names of the real owners.
As
the clients in Malta (Mizzi and Schembri, acting through their local
Mossack Fonseca office) pressed to obtain the documents to set
up the Dubai account by August 28, Mossack Fonseca in
Panama became concerned that both Schembri and Mizzi were
"PEPs", or Politically Exposed Persons.
"As
both settlors [that is, the parties that set up the trust] are PEP,
our NZ colleagues need to be comfortable that sufficient due
diligence has been carried out to ascertain that funds being settled
are not subject to any corruption risk, and ideally that they come
from income generated prior to thesettlors' political
appointment," a Mossack Fonseca operative in Panama
wrote.
"With
respect to Haast Trust, it would appear that there was some negative
coverage regarding the tender process for supply of paper to the
government shortly after the settlor's appointment as Chief of Staff,
so if you could also include a detailed information about this, that
will be a very important information for us as well."
A
follow-up email noted that "there is also some negative
publicity regarding the amount of remuneration for KM's [energy
minister Konrad Mizzi's] wife".
Mossack Fonseca
also sought more information on what the companies would do, as "the
reference to 'management consultancy and brokerage' does not explain
this".
No
further reference was made to the Dubai account, but meanwhile FPB
Bank in Panama had refused to open an account for Hearnville and
Tillgate after learning the identity of the Ultimate Beneficial
Owners (UBOs) of the companies.
The
bank offered several reasons for the knockback, but "the
principal of them [is] that the UBOs of the said companies are PEP",
the Mossack Fonseca executive wrote.
He
said, somewhat obscurely, that Mossack Fonseca had
referred the matter to "two persons who will help us with these
bank accounts".
The
documents show Mossack Fonseca's chief concern was to be able to
show they had taken some steps to verify the bona fides of clients.
In
an unrelated matter in late 2015, Mossack Fonseca was
setting up a New Zealand trust for a different client, which
would be titled Humanitarian Intervention Relief and Research Trust,
also with a Panama company.
Becerra
"had been prosecuted by the Criminal Court of Spain for a
presumable fraud and money laundering, but the Court ruled in favour
of Becerra absolving him from any charge", a Mossack Fonseca
operative noted.
Back
in Malta, in February 2016, Schembri told journalists he "was
informed of the possibility of my local bankers changing their
business model or transferring their trusts business to third
parties".
"My
New Zealand-based trust, together with any attached company, which
has not traded so far, was opened as a contingency for this reason
upon advice from my financial advisers. I will also be asking a
reputed auditing firm, independent of my financial advisers, to audit
the New Zealand-based trust and related operations, and will make
this report available to the media."
Mizzi
confirmed the existence of his New Zealand holdings, releasing a
statement by Orion Trust (New Zealand), signed by Giselle Ocampo
Fonseca, that Rotorua Trust "does not, as to date [sic], have
any bank account in its name and Orion does not hold any bank
accounts in the Trust's name".
This
careful wording appears to be accurate.
On
February 29, Mizzi announced he would close down his Panama
company after a tax audit, but would retain the New Zealand
trust.
As
the Malta controversy deepened, by late last month the embattled
prime minister Muscat was ready to take a break.
He
spent the Easter holiday at Atlantis the Palm, a five-star resort in
Dubai.
The
Largest Leak In History, What You Need To Know About The Panama
Papers
In
this video Luke Rudkowski covers the breaking news of the Panama
Papers and its implications. We go over what the leaks reveal and its
political motivation. Stay tuned for more on this issue as it is
breaking now. Support us on Patreon so we can continue doing this
critical important work for you.
Posts
Sergei
Skripal
Italian
Premier Matteo Renzi, right, and Maltese Premier Joseph
Muscat.