A judge is expected to rule next week whether the bosses of French bank BNP Paribas can refuse to appear in court in Malta to testify in a €1 billion anti-semitism lawsuit filed by a Maltese investment house and its founder, Malta-based businessman Jacob Agam.

Mr Justice Joseph Zammit McKeon had already ordered the chairman and the CEO of the bank to appear in court to testify, but they resisted the order, arguing that they could not be forced to come to Malta to testify. 

Malta-based businessman Jacob Agram

In a sitting scheduled for Thursday next week, the judge is expected to rule whether to enforce his order, issued last August, with the possibility of escalating it to a warrant of arrest if the pair failed to appear. 

The lawsuit was filed against the bank, its chairman Jean Lemierre and CEO Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, after Agam, a British-Israeli businessman, accused it of committing a campaign of distraction “inspired by anti-semitism and hate” against his Maltese assets, including his investment house, Vertical Group Holding.

He is seeking €1 billion in damages from Banque Paribas which was allegedly involved in the financing of Electrogas, the company which controversially won the Delimara power station project which has been plagued by allegations of corruption and linked to the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

BNP Paribas CEO Jean-Laurent Bonnafé

The consortium is made up of the Gasan Group, the Fenech family of Tumas Group and the Apap Bologna family. The three together own GEM Holdings, which has a 33 per cent shareholding in the Electrogas project. German giants Siemens and Azerbaijan's state energy company SOCAR each also have 33 per cent stakes in the venture.

The lawsuit against BNP Paribas and its bosses, including the bank’s legal counsel Valerie Lafarge-Sarkozy, had been filed in 2019. Agam and Vertical claim that the intentional actions of the bank and its executives affected his and his company's business and reputation, resulting in significant damages. 

The case has been stalled on whether an in-camera decree given by Mr Justice Zammit Mckeon for Bonnafé and Lemierre to take the stand as witnesses can be appealed. The bank had initially argued that the Maltese court held no jurisdiction over this case since the bank had no business in Malta.

BNP Paribas chairman Jean Lemierre

However, Mr Justice Zammit Mckeon ruled that it did and ordered the top executives of BNP Paribas to appear before the court to face the accusations brought against them by Agam. 

Agam told the court that BNP Paribas had been involved in other transactions, such as with the now-defunct company 'Malta Cross'.

His lawyer, Pio Valletta, stressed in court that the decree ordering her bank’s executives to appear in court to testify could not be appealed and they were legally obliged to appear in court. He said the executives’ suggestion that they could send someone to testify on their behalf was “unheard of” and “bizarre”.