Former More Supermarkets boss Ryan Schembri has been arrested in the UK and is being extradited to Malta.

Schembri fled Malta in 2014, leaving behind a trail of debts worth millions of euros.

He has now been arrested in Scotland on the strength of a European Arrest Warrant requested by the Maltese authorities.

Sources say Schembri is wanted in Malta on suspicions of fraud and money laundering.

The ex-supermarket boss is believed to have slipped out of Malta in 2014 after loan sharks turned on him and started threatening him and his son.

Schembri has long faced fraud claims over the spectacular collapse of the More supermarket chain, which left behind a trail of unpaid debts.

In 2016, Darren Casha, who had taken over the sinking chain, claimed in a judicial protest that Schembri had fooled him into making the investment and that the accounts he had been shown were “mistaken and far from the truth”.

Schembri is believed to have left Malta with around €40 million in debts.

In the judicial protest, Casha’s lawyer claimed his client had suffered huge damages due to Schembri’s “deceit, illegal, abusive and fraudulent behaviour”.

Slain lawyer Carmel Chircop was one of the 'investors' in the supermarket chain.

Chircop had personally entered into a contract with Schembri to loan him the sum of €750,000.

Appearing as debtors in the contract were Schembri’s business partner Etienne Cassar, but also Adrian Agius – now known as one of the men first arrested by police in December 2017 in connection with the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, and later released on police bail.

Agius was last year charged with commissioning Chircop's murder, while his brother Robert is seperately charged with supplying to bomb used to assassinate Caruana Galizia. 

Six months after Chircop’s murder October 2015 murder, Adrian Agius took recourse to the law courts in a bid to cancel the notarial deed that had locked in his property as guarantee for the €750,000 debt.

Chircop’s widow, however, refused the claim, insisting that Agius himself had informed the victim “to take his villa as repayment for the loan...”

The Agius brothers were charged over the murders on the strength of a pardon given to self-confessed hitman Vince Muscat, who forms part of the same alleged criminal gang. 

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