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MT 29 July 2018

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25 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 29 JULY 2018 OPINION Yet the ones reproduced on Daphne's blog, and (separate- ly) passed on to the magistrate by Pierre Portelli, had letter- heads. Anyone care to explain these discrepancies? It's rather im- portant, if you still insist that the allegations are true. One of the first things any investiga- tor would look for are varia- tions within a witness's ver- sion of events: and with good reason; for while the versions may change... the truth does not. Daphne either had those documents, or didn't. Efimova either gave (or showed) them to Daphne, or vice versa. The one thing those conflicting versions cannot possibly both be, is true. Another thing our compos- ite picture must account for are the anomalies within the document itself. We were told (and we didn't even have to wait 15 months for the inquiry) that the personal information printed thereon had been gleaned from Mi- chelle Muscat's passport, and also her Maltese ID card. This was pointed out because the information itself was in part contradictory: Muscat's ID card claims a different 'place of birth' than her passport. Two questions arise, both of which must be answered by our hypothesis. Why would Michelle Muscat use two documents to fill in those de- tails, when all the information could have been relieved from only one? And, more compel- lingly: why would she use her Maltese ID card – which has no legal validity outside the EU – to open an account in Panama? Next on the list, the disap- pearing bank accounts. Apart from the declaration of trust, Daphne Caruana Galizia also uploaded the text of an (al- leged) bank transfer of $1.017 million from an Azerbai- jani account, into one held by Egrant. The magistrate, however, found no evidence of any bank account ever opened by Egrant Inc, and no record of this particular transaction either. This detail is significant in light of the broader implica- tions of the allegation itself: money laundering. Dirty money can only be laundered through the regular banking system; otherwise, it doesn't come out 'clean'. For Egrant to successfully launder any amount of dirty money, it would have had to possess a bank account, registered and recognised by international banking regulators. (And no, the 'absence of evidence' argument doesn't hold in this case: to delete evidence that a regular bank account once ex- isted – anywhere in the world – you would have to somehow erase the memory cells of the computer systems common to all banking authorities where such transactions are recorded.) I would therefore expect our theory to account for the claim that $1.017 million could have been deposited into a bank account for the purpose of being 'laundered', when no records of either deposit or bank account exist anywhere. We would also have to explain how the Pilatus chair- man could possibly have spir- ited evidence out of that bank in the dead of night, when CCTV footage examined by the magistrate established that he never retrieved any documents from any safe, nor put anything into the suitcas- es with which he eventually left the office. And I won't even bother with the falsified signatures at this stage; that is the one detail latched onto by Bugeja's detractors to date, and for this we might have a possible alternative explana- tion. Forging signatures may (but then again, may not) be standard practice in this line of business: for the purely practical reason of having to sign 1,700 documents in a single day. But falsified signatures on a document that shows separate signs of tampering, in the context of a version of events that has changed more than once, coupled with evidence that other major planks of the same allegation (indeed, all of them) were likewise fabricated or un- true...? I don't know. I'm just glad that it doesn't have to be me to come up with this new composite picture in the end. After all, our newly discov- ered 'burden of proof' applies just as much to this scenario, as any other. If you still think the Egrant inquiry was a whitewash... prove it. know

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