One of the men suspected of facilitating money-laundering at the now-defunct Pilatus Bank was allegedly allowed to enter and leave Malta while facing an arrest warrant.
In a press conference outside the law courts, Repubblika president Robert Aquilina said suspect Mehmet Tasli had even walked in and out of the court building last year unchallenged.
According to Aquilina, Tasli was summoned as a witness in October 2021 to testify about a request by the bank for a partial lifting of its freezing order, to be allowed to carry out certain payments.
“There were two Attorney General lawyers present that day. They cross-examined Tasli. They questioned him, then allowed him to walk out of the court building. He was allowed to leave Malta unchallenged,” Aquilina said.
A month earlier, both the bank and one of its former officials had been charged with money laundering. Court action had also been ordered against other top officials, including Tasli and former bank owner Ali Sadr, yet the police have yet to charge them.
'Justice turned into farce'
Aquilina accused both the police and Attorney General of failing to execute the arrest warrants signed by the magistrate who led the inquiry, therefore turning the law and judicial process into a farce.
The Repubblika president said the NGO, aided by lawyer and former MP Jason Azzopardi, will on Monday file a case to strike down the Attorney General’s decision not to act against “the entire Pilatus clique”.
As part of the case, Azzopardi presented an affidavit detailing how Tasli had been allowed to walk free.
Aquilina said the 500,000-page Pilatus inquiry had found “irrefutable evidence” of money-laundering, as well evidence of trading-in-influence by former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri, for which the inquiring magistrate had ordered criminal action.
Aquilina said that 16 months after the conclusion of the inquiry, Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg had failed to act against five individuals named in the inquiry.
“There are serious crimes that damaged Malta’s reputation and carry close to 20 years imprisonment. The Attorney General is ignoring a court order.”
Police Commissioner Angelo Gafa said last week that the international arrest warrants were in the process of being issued. MaltaToday subsequently reported that the warrants were issued earlier this year.
Last year, the FIAU fined Pilatus Bank a record €4.9 million over its failures to prevent money-laundering at the bank.
The FIAU said the bank’s dependence on a “series of connections to the Caucus region,” a veiled reference to Pilatus’s high number of Azeri clients, made it impossible for the bank to ever take concrete actions in respect of any transactions, activity or relationship deemed to be suspicious.