It will take experts almost a year to unlock Joseph Muscat’s phone and look at content related to the Vitals inquiry, a court was told on Thursday.
Court expert Keith Cutajar was testifying in proceedings against Muscat, former chief of staff Keith Schembri, former minister Konrad Mizzi and others in connection with the Vitals hospitals concession granted by the Muscat government and later annulled by the courts.
Muscat and the other accused face charges of money laundering, corruption, and bribery. During Thursday's sitting, several witnesses presented banking information related to the defendants to the court.
Cutajar gave the court an update after he was previously tasked with unlocking Muscat’s phone so that it could be examined as evidence.
He said he had started this process at the start of the inquiry but had to stop after he was asked to present the phone, an iPhone 12 model, to the court as part of the acts of the case. He was ordered to continue the extraction process on September 23 this year.
Cutajar said that as of today, a computer program has been running for 23 days and as things stood it would complete trying all password combinations possible to unlock the phone in 298 days, or just roughly two months short of a year.
The software is trying 1,100 combinations per day.
Asked by the court whether the software could pick up where it had left off with the unlocking process, Cutajar said that this was not possible, the process had to be stopped when the phone needed to be presented as evidenced and that when it was restarted the software had to start from scratch.
Separately, the prosecution also presented the acts of Adrian Delia’s civil case, which ultimately led to the hospitals concession deal being cancelled by the courts.
This raised some opposition from the defence bench, with lawyer Stephen Tonna Lowell asking what relevance this had to the case at hand and whether the defence would be able to cross-examine witnesses related to this evidence.
Magistrate Rachel Montebello said that the admissibility of the evidence was not being decided at this stage of proceedings.
Laura Saydon, representing Fexserv, presented documents that showed Konrad Mizzi held an account, opened in 2020, with a balance of €3,225. She also said that another defendant, Mario Gatt, did not have an account with the company but had once used its services to convert some €700 into Japanese Yen. Em@ney representative Kevin Causon confirmed that Muscat held an account there, but not much else, as he did not know off-hand. Asked why he hadn’t brought any documents with him to support his testimony, Causon told the court that the summons he was presented had not instructed him to do so.
The case was adjourned to January 8.