Updated: 8.30am

Former Labour MP and popular doctor Silvio Grixti will be charged in court later this month in connection with his role in the social benefits racket.

Following months of investigations, police have filed charges in court and the arraignment is scheduled for March 22 before Magistrate Leonard Caruana, senior government sources have confirmed.

Grixti will be one of five people to face criminal charges, sources said.

The others are Roger Agius, 45 and from Luqa, Emmanuel Spagnol, 69 and from Żejtun, 36-year-old Dustin Caruana and 33-year-old Luke Saliba. 

Agius was Grixti's driver and prosecutors believe he played a major role in the racket. Spagnol is suspected of having served as a fixer in the racket while investigators believe Caruana was a runner. Saliba, meanwhile, is suspected of having used his IT skills to perpetuate the fraud.

Last September, Times of Malta revealed how Grixti was implicated in a years-long racket to help “hundreds” of people fraudulently receive monthly disability benefits they were not entitled to.

Evidence indicates Grixti provided false medical documents to help people, often hailing from Labour strongholds, to receive social benefits averaging €450 monthly for severe disabilities they did not suffer from.

The police’s Financial Crime Investigations Department (FCID) began investigating the racket in October 2021, after an e-mail flagged a suspicion that a number of individuals had been presenting forged medical certificates to claim unjustified social benefits.

Since then, police have combed through hundreds of suspicious files of people who were receiving the benefits, interrogated them and charged most of them in court.

Some of the claimants told police they were referred to Grixti by a Labour minister, PL politicians’ aides, and even customer care officials from the Prime Minister’s Office.

The OPM, along with all implicated individuals, deny any involvement in the racket, and it remains unclear whether the people who allegedly referred the benefits claimants to Grixti were aware of the racket and whether they intentionally meant to help the patients defraud the government.

Grixti provided false medical documents to help people, often hailing from Labour strongholds, to receive social benefits averaging €450 monthly for severe disabilities they did not suffer from

Grixti resigned from parliament in December 2021, shortly after being detained and questioned by police. He was questioned again last November.

A laptop seized in connection with the probe helped uncover the scale and organisation of the racket, and the hundreds of people arraigned in court over the past months have shed light on its impressive industrial scale.

Grixti, who at the time was a backbench MP, would allegedly give people an envelope containing medical documents certified by several consultants, all saying they examined the benefit claimant and found them to be suffering from a severe disability.

To qualify for the social benefits, claimants would need to provide certification from either a neurologist or psychiatrist. All these documents appear to have been forged as part of the racket, which mushroomed over the years.

The medical specialists named in the documents – who include Mater Dei Hospital neurologists and other medical professionals – have told police investigators they had never even seen the patients they had supposedly certified, let alone signed off on documents.

The package of forged documents, presented to the social security department, even included a false Transport Malta declaration saying that the claimant had surrendered his or her driver’s licence, which is a requirement for people who suffer from frequent epileptic fits.

Furthermore, the racket became renowned enough within Labour circles to take a life of its own, with some claimants telling police they obtained the forged certificates from people other than Grixti.

Grixti was a PL MP between 2017 and 2021. Times of Malta has been informed he stopped paying his party membership in 2021, when he resigned from parliament and the parliamentary group.