Magistrate Ian Farrugia resigns 'for personal reasons'
Farrugia had led inquiries into Pilatus Bank and the Montenegro wind farm
Updated 10.17am with statement by the Office of the President.
Magistrate Ian Farrugia has resigned from the Bench.
The Office of the President said the president had accepted his resignation, for personal reasons, dated August 11. She thanked him for his service.
Farrugia is expected to move abroad, where he has family, in the coming months.
A recent call for new magistrates issued by the justice ministry is partly due to Farrugia’s resignation, according to sources. Farrugia was sworn in as a magistrate in June 2012, having previously specialised in criminal law.
He went on to lead several prominent inquiries over the years, including a probe into Pilatus Bank which recommended criminal action against a number of bank personnel. At the time of the probe, Farrugia signed an international warrant for the arrest of the bank’s chair, Ali Sadr.
The inquiry was concluded in December 2020 at the cost of €7.5m, however its conclusions were, controversially, never published.
Over the years, Farrugia frequently expressed his unhappiness with Malta’s lax enforcement of noise pollution laws
Farrugia was also leading an inquiry into a Montenegro wind farm project through which €4.6m was funnelled to 17 Black, the secret offshore company owned by Yorgen Fenech.
It is not known whether the inquiry, which has been ongoing for several years, is close to completion or whether it will be re-assigned to another magistrate. This wasn’t Farrugia’s only brush with Fenech. Last year, Farrugia found former gaming authority chief executive Heathcliff Farrugia guilty of having tipped off Fenech about an upcoming audit at a rival casino.
Farrugia had also presided over the case of Leisure Clothing, a Bulebel-based clothing factory in which two directors were accused of trafficking Vietnamese workers and exploiting them under sweatshop-like conditions. Farrugia had acquitted one of the two directors, finding the other guilty, handing him a suspended sentence. A court of appeals later found both guilty, sentencing them to six years imprisonment.
Over the years, Farrugia frequently expressed his unhappiness with Malta’s lax enforcement of noise pollution laws. In 2016, he used the bench to call out the authorities’ “cowardly” inertia on noise pollution in St Julian’s, saying the courts were inundated with cases of noise pollution.