Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1007543
maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 25 JULY 2018 4 NEWS MATTHEW VELLA PERHAPS the enduring image of the nefariousness of the Pila- tus 'banksters' in their complicity in the Egrant affair was the live footage of Ali Sadr Hashemine- jad, the American-Iranian bank owner slipping out of the bank with two pieces of luggage, ig- noring questions by a Nationalist Party TV journalist. It was 20 April, 2017 – the night in which the late journal- ist Daphne Caruana Galizia launched the explosive allega- tion that Michelle Muscat, wife of the Maltese Prime Minister, owned the secret Panama com- pany Egrant Inc. From then on, the narrative seemed irremediably unalter- able: Hasheminejad had whisked out the crucial evidence of wrongdoing, and put it straight onto a private jet headed for Ba- ku, Azerbaijan. Fifteen months later, Magis- The Pilatus suitcase Baku flight: a conspiracy theory with legs EGRANT INC. INQUIRY REPORT CONCLUSIONS CCTV footage shows no 'Egrant' documents were smuggled out of Pilatus onto a f light to Baku PAUL COCKS ON 20 April 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia claimed on her blog that within a safe at Pilatus Bank were declarations of trust that clearly established that the ultimate beneficial owner of se- cret Panama company Egrant was Michelle Muscat – wife of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. The safe, she said, was situated in the bank's kitchen, after a stint in the CEO's office. She claimed that the documents had been scanned to the cloud by third parties so that they could not be destroyed by the bank. The following day, Caruana Galizia uploaded to her blog, text which she claimed to have been taken from two declara- Forged signatures point to conspiracy KURT SANSONE THE following are some of the incon- sistencies flagged by Magistrate Aaron Bugeja in the testimony of Daphne Caruana Galizia (DCG), Pierre Portelli (PP) and Maria Efimova (ME) 1. Michael Satariano and the $1 million transaction Satariano was an assistant manager at Nexia BT between April 2015 and May 2016. In one of her blogs, Daphne Caru- ana Galizia claimed that Satariano (she did not name him but said she had his name) had been chasing Pilatus Bank in- cessantly over an alleged transaction of $1 million from Azerbaijan-owned com- pany Sahra FZCO to Egrant Inc., which was taking its time after it raised ques- tions with the US correspondent bank. Caruana Galizia also alleged that Sa- tariano was involved in the setting up of Egrant in 2013 and had consigned the bank account opening forms for Egrant, Tillgate and Hearnville to Pilatus Bank. What they told the magistrate DCG: Maria Efimova told her that Sa- tariano had been pestering Pilatus Bank over the $1 million transaction to Egrant Inc. and was the man who delivered the bank account opening forms for the three Panama companies. ME: Caruana Galizia must have mixed things up and that is not what she had told her. Efimova said it was Caruana Galizia who asked her about the $1 mil- lion transaction and not the other way around. Efimova gives differing versions of the transaction and how it happened. What the magistrate found Satariano had been pestering Pilatus Bank but this was unrelated to Egrant. The Nexia employee was asking about the case of Italian clients by the name Corrado and Fiore, and the companies Privilege Ltd and Exiat Holdings Ltd. The magistrate also found that Satari- ano could not been involved in the set- ting up of Egrant back in 2013 because he was not even employed with Nexia at the time. Egrant, Tillgate and Hearnville never had accounts at Pilatus Bank. The magistrate also concluded that the arti- cle in which Caruana Galizia alleged that $1 million were transferred to Egrant was based on the wrong interpretation of "misguided information" pertaining to an FIAU compliance report of Pi- latus in May 2016. There was never any such transaction between the Dubai- based company and Egrant, Tillgate and Hearnville. Indeed, the three Panama companies did not have accounts at Pi- latus. 2. Efimova and Caruana Galizia meetings Efimova was unclear when she first met Caruana Galizia, giving different versions to the magistrate and an Italian newspaper. What Efimova told the magistrate First testimony: She met Caruana Gali- zia three or four times. The first meeting took place in March 2017 at Efimova's house. Second testimony: The first meeting took place sometime after Easter of 2017. Third testimony: The first meeting took place in March, or sometime before or after Easter of 2017. What the magistrate found Easter in 2017 came in April, not March, and in a subsequent interview Efimova gave the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, she said the first meeting took place in September or October 2016, some six months after she was sacked from Pilatus Bank. 3. The declarations of trust These were supposed to be the cru- cial documents showing that Egrant be- longed to Michelle Muscat and which according to what Caruana Galizia wrote in her blog, had been scanned and uploaded to "the cloud" for safe keeping sometime in 2016. What they told the magistrate DCG 1: On 27 April, she told the in- quiry that she had a copy of the docu- ments. DCG 2: On 31 May, Caruana Galizia clarified her first testimony by saying that she knew where the documents were but these were not in her possession. She put down the apparent inconsistency to the fact that in April, nobody knew who the 'whistleblower' was. Caruana Gali- zia insisted that she saw printouts of the declarations of trust held by Maria Efi- mova and not just digital copies. Caru- ana Galizia said Efimova had scans/soft copies and printouts of the documents. Caruana Galizia said Efimova told her that she had scanned the documents and uploaded them to her personal cloud but did not take them out from the Pilatus safe. PP: He had reached an agreement with Efimova to give him a copy of the decla- rations of trust after she would have ac- cessed her iCloud account using a VPN (software that masks the user's identity and location when accessing the inter- net). Efimova never gave him the docu- ments. He said that Caruana Galizia and Efimova both told him that they had passed on these documents to the in- quiring magistrate. Portelli does not say from where he got the declarations of trust that he passed on to the magistrate. ME 1: It was Caruana Galizia who showed her the declarations of trust for Egrant and Sahra FZCO. Caruana Galizia never told her from where she got copies of the declarations of trust. Efimova said she never took any copies or photos of these documents when she worked at Pilatus Bank. ME 2: In her fourth testimony Efimo- va said she had seen the bank account opening forms for Egrant, Tillgate and Hearnville in March 2016 and saw them in a batch with other documents she was reviewing. She said the declarations of trust did not have a letterhead. What the magistrate found The testimony of Caruana Galizia and Portelli tallied in that Efimova must have had access to a digital copy of the docu- ments if they were on her iCloud. However, Efimova's version was dia- metrically opposed to Caruana Galizia's when she said that it was the journalist who showed her documents and not the other way around. Forensic searches at Nexia BT and Pilatus Bank, information from the Panama Papers cache and tes- timony of Pilatus Bank employees con- firmed that the bank account opening forms for Egrant, Tillgate and Hearn- ville never existed. The companies did not have bank accounts at Pilatus and Egrant was never owned by the Mus- cats. The inquiring magistrate was never given or shown any documents by either Caruana Galizia or Efimova, contrary to what Pierre Portelli claimed to have been told. Efimova's testimony that the docu- ments she saw at the bank did not have a letterhead, contradicted the transcripts Caruana Galizia produced on her blog and the documents Portelli eventually handed the magistrate. The documents turned out to be false, with forged sig- natures. Inconsistencies flagged by the magistrate