A book released on Saturday concludes that police officers tasked with investigating suspected money laundering at Pilatus Bank were searching for justifications for the decision not to prosecute top bank officials.  

The emails show how three police inspectors discussed how they needed “points” to justify the decision by the Attorney General not to prosecute Pilatus Bank’s former risk manager Antoniella Gauci and operations supervisor Mehmet Tasli despite a magisterial inquiry recommending money-laundering charges against them.

The emails form part of a book published on Saturday by NGO Repubblika president Robert Aquilina who chose to defy a court ban to make the evidence public in what he described as the best interest of justice revolving around the now-shuttered bank.

More than two-thirds of the 700-page book – Pilatus: A laundromat bank in Europe – contains documentation presented in court during court proceedings related to the bank as well as Repubblika’s case challenging the state officials for not acting on the recommendation of a magisterial inquiry to prosecute a number of Pilatus Bank officials.

Collusion with senior bank officials

Aquilina claims that AG Victoria Buttigieg colluded with senior police officers to decide to give Gauci “a get-out-of-jail-free card”.

He said together they decided to issue a declaration, known in legal jargon as a nolle prosequi, to ensure that the authorities will not prosecute her, despite direction from inquiring magistrate Ian Farrugia to arraign her.

The emails also suggested that the police did not have a justification for their request for such a declaration and were scrambling to find reasons to back up their recommendation to the AG.

The emails were copied to their boss, Alexandra Mamo, the former deputy police commissioner and head of the police Financial Crimes Investigations Department.  

One email from police inspector Keith Vella, a former member of the anti-money laundering squad, to fellow inspectors Claire Borg and Pauline Bonello was sent on July 13, 2021.

He told his colleagues to “think about a few points related to Antoniella and Tasli’s nolle prosequi”.

“We need to have a clear picture by the end of the week.”

The author says the email was clearly intended to find reasons for the police to be able to say they did not have enough evidence at hand to proceed with a prosecution and retrospectively support the decision to request the issuance of a nolle prosequi.

In a subsequent email Vella sent his colleagues on August 10, including Mamo in copy, Vella attached the nolle prosequi request to the AG, asking them to go through it and remove or add anything they felt they needed.

In a return email, Mamo thanked the inspectors Vella and Borg for their work, saying “thank you would be an understatement”. She urged the inspectors to conclude the process by the following morning as the request had to reach the AG’s office later that day. 

The August 2020 interview

Aquilina referred to a Times of Malta interview with Angelo Gafà on August 7, 2020, in which he revealed that the police were in the process of concluding their investigations into the bank and were expected to proceed with court arraignments.

Gafà said in the interview that although people thought the police were doing nothing, the force was close to solving the case.

He did not mention the bank by name or give away any details but Times of Malta had ascertained from other sources that he was referring to Pilatus.

"Any reasonable and objective person being faced with these irrefutable facts and actions taken at the highest levels of the police force would logically and naturally realise that something had happened between the moment when Angelo Gafà announced enthusiastically that the police would be starting prosecutions on the Pilatus case and the moment when his [Gafà] top brass and the Attorney General went out of their way to go against the Inquiring Magistrate's clear direction, stall the arraignments and issue get-out-of-jail-free cards to Antoniella Jane Gauci and Mehmet Tasli,” Aquilina wrote in his book.

“Even if one were to give them the benefit of the doubt and consider the possibility that they felt they did not have enough evidence at hand to proceed with the prosecution of Gauci and Tasli, their actions are unexplainable and inexcusable,” he added.

The book cites a source suggesting that the intention had been to shield Gauci from prosecution “possibly, indeed probably, due to her and her family’s close political connections.”  

That source claims that Gauci’s father and brother were political canvassers for Prime Minister Robert Abela, who had been the Gauci family business’ lawyer while he was still in private practice.

Clear direction to prosecute

He argued that once the inquiring magistrate had given them a clear direction to prosecute six people “any reasonable and diligent police officer and a proper Attorney General” would have continued to investigate with the intention of collecting enough evidence to eventually prosecute successfully all six.

“This is ample and irrefutable proof that the top brass of the police force and the Attorney General were neither reasonable nor were they acting in good faith.

"There is more clear evidence to support this conclusion,” Aquilina wrote, referring to requests made by inspectors Vella, Borg and Bonello on behalf of the Police Commissioner to Magistrate Ian Farrugia on February 24, 2021, in which they asked him to issue a European and an International Arrest warrant in respect of Tasli.

By July, the inspectors were scrambling to justify their decision not to prosecute and in September, they prosecuted the bank and its former anti-money laundering reporting officer, Claude-Ann Sant Fournier, accusing them of money laundering.

Sant Fournier is accused of aiding and abetting money laundering activities both in her personal capacity as well as in her former official role at the bank.

Charges were issued against her and Pilatus Bank following a magisterial inquiry that is understood to have cost the state over €7.5 million.

The bank’s former owner and chairman as well as other former directors, have so far remained unpunished, despite the inquiry saying they had a case to answer to.

Bank chairman Ali Sadr, director Hamid Ghanbari and Tasli all had international arrest warrants signed off by the inquiring magistrate in February 2021.

Sadr, along with the former directors, left Malta after the bank was shuttered by authorities in 2018 over money-laundering concerns.

Sadr is suspected to have knowingly helped his bank’s clients transfer, convert and conceal the proceeds of crime, according to the inquiry findings.

The inquiry was concluded and handed to the Attorney General in December 2020.

Pilatus Bank’s lax money-laundering controls have been on the radar ever since a 2016 inspection of the bank by the financial regulator and the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU).

Pilatus was fined a record €4.9 million by the FIAU for letting millions in suspect funds flow through Malta unchallenged.

Times of Malta exposed in January 2022 how the bank was used to send $10 million worth of potentially “suspicious” transactions to a mystery company found in the 17 Black money trail.

Gauci was famously filmed surreptitiously exiting the bank alongside Sadr on the night that slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia linked the Panama company Egrant to former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s wife Michelle. No evidence was ever found at the bank to confirm Caruana Galizia’s claims. 

Expert report recommending further Egrant probe published

As part of his book, Aquilina also published a 400-page report by US management consultancy experts Duff & Phelps.

The experts had recommended further investigative steps be taken to get to the bottom of claims surrounding secret company Egrant.

Duff & Phelps said in their report that Maltese investigators should take further steps to verify whether a $1 million payment to Egrant really took place.

The experts also recommended that Pilatus whistleblower Maria Efimova be interviewed by investigators about her claims on the alleged Egrant account and transactions, as well as about an alleged parallel accounting system.

Although the probe did not find evidence of such a parallel system or of any transaction records being hidden or deleted, the experts nonetheless left the door open for further investigations, with their recommendation to interview Efimova and liaise with US authorities about the claimed transaction.

The Duff & Phelps catalogues a litany of anti-money laundering compliance failures at the bank.

These include:

• Failures to properly question the source of funds parked at the bank by members of Azerbaijan’s running elite;
• The investigation into Pilatus Bank’s operations came across scores of potentially suspicious transactions and corporate structures operated by the bank’s clients, including the daughters of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev. Using an array of complex corporate vehicles, Aliyev’s two daughters alone parked over €120 million in loans and deposits at the Ta’ Xbiex-based bank.
• Around 25 per cent of the funds held by various customers at the bank flowed in from the UAE, including payments to Azeri-controlled accounts. Other significant financial flows into the bank were detected from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
• Pilatus appears to have been used as a staging post by account holders to move funds out of countries viewed as being at a high risk of financial crime into relatively lower-risk jurisdictions.
• Questions were also raised by the experts about the initial scrutiny of the bank by the MFSA, during the licensing phase.
• The experts recommended that investigators delve further into the true origins of the funds used by Sadr to set up the bank.