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MALTATODAY 19 July 2020

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2 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 19 JULY 2020 Cases 675 Local 578 Active 4 Recoveries 662 Deaths 9 Swabs 112,403 LATEST COVID-19 www.maltatoday.com.mt/covid19 NEWS Delivery fee of just €1 per day for orders up to 5 newspapers per address To subscribe 1. Email us your choice of newspapers, recipient's name, address, contact number to production@ millermalta.com 2. Forward cheques payabale to Miller Dis- tributors Ltd to address: Miller House, Airport Way, Tarxien Road, Luqa LQA1814 Queries on other news- papers and magazines, contact production@millermal- ta.com maltatoday Same-day delivery of your favourite Sunday newspaper Monday-Friday MaltaToday Midweek • €1 BusinessToday • €1.50 Sunday MaltaToday • €1.95 ILLUM • €1.25 Support your favourite newspaper with a subscription https://bit.ly/2X9csmr MATTHEW VELLA A fantastical claim that Daphne Caruana Galizia had been as- sassinated in a Russian hit-job intended at destabilising the country, was concocted inside the Office of the Prime Minis- ter together with a UK commu- nications firm. According to two sources who remember the events of 2018 inside the OPM, claims of a Russian plot behind the murder of the journalist were developed some time after con- sultants Chelgate were brought over to assist the Maltese gov- ernment in its public relations abroad. Although MaltaToday's sources say they remember Chelgate's Robert Winstanley at a desk in Castille, they think the firm was engaged by former chief of staff Keith Schembri. Winstanley's name was men- tioned this week by former government spokesperson Kurt Farrugia in the Caruana Galizia public inquiry. Yet both the Principal Per- manent Secretary, on behalf of the OPM, and the foreign ministry's permanent secretar- iat, have turned down Freedom of Information requests from MaltaToday for a copy of the contract for PR firm Chelgate. Malta's principal permanent secretary said that Chelgate "was never contracted to ren- der services to the OPM". But Winstanley was in talks with OPM staff in 2018, to make representations to the United Kingdom's House of Commons committee on fake news, and denies that the gov- ernment's representatives had ever met directors from the controversial data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. MaltaToday's sources insist that it was at this time that the first whispers of the Russian hit-job started being shared in- side the OPM. "It was meant to be suggested to the press that the Americans and English in- telligence services were sus- pecting a Russian hit-job – but nobody took the bait." But while the OPM denies having seen the report alleging the Russian plot, even the two firms caught in the crossfire – reputation managers Chelgate and a Luxembourg private in- vestigator's firm – claim they were targeted in a deliberate act of disinformation. Sandstone legal action According to "excerpts" of the research published by Brussels newspaper EUobserver, the in- vestigation would have posited that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev had conspired to assassinate Caruana Galizia, using a Chechen killer. But Luxembourg private in- vestigators Sandstone denied what it says are "false and dam- aging" allegations that it au- thored the 'Russian hit-job' re- port on behalf of Chelgate. The Brussels newspaper was facing legal action for defama- tion by Sandstone, but the Lux- embourg prosecutor is of the opinion that the matter should be dealt with in the Belgian ju- risdiction. Sandstone director Frank Schneider told Malta- Today he was "looking into the option" of filing a complaint in Belgium. Schneider insists that the Rus- sian hit-job 'report' consists of material that the company had received but never made use of. "The report referred to by the EUobserver does exist, but it was not prepared by Sandstone or anyone working for Sand- stone," Schneider said. The question is: who supplied that kind of material in the first place? Government sources inside the OPM in 2018 told MaltaToday they remember Robert Winstanley as the only Chelgate employee present in meetings with communications staff. Today Winstanley runs his own communications firm, Halycon, a company registered in Malta. At least five attempts to contact Winstanley by email and WhatsApp went unan- swered. Sandstone's Schneider claims the report was among mate- rial received from a variety of sources while researching the background to the Maltese controversies in 2018. "Sand- stone took the view that the report was weak and uncon- vincing, and chose to make no use of it. It was never forwarded in any form to Chelgate, nor to any representative of the gov- ernment of Malta, nor to any other third party. It, therefore, formed no part of any media briefings," Schneider said. "The fact that this weak and inaccurate report was provided to the EUobserver, with false indications as to its usage, sug- gests an act of deliberate mis- information by a third party which by now has been identi- fied by Sandstone and provided to the state prosecutor in sup- port of the criminal investiga- tion." Russian bogey-man The arrests made in the Caru- ana Galizia assassination today could not be further from the conspiratorial and fantastical cloak-and-dagger theory that the journalist was targeted by foreign interests, ostensibly in a bid to destabilize the Maltese government. But according to MaltaTo- day's same sources, they had actively used "truthful" pieces of information with a Russian flavour to fuel suspicions in the press of a deliberate external act on the Maltese government, to deflect attention from Caru- ana Galizia's stories. One of those instances was a report in the French intelli- gence bulletin Intelligence On- line, in which one of Caruana Galizia's sources – the Russian, former Pilatus Bank employee Maria Efimova – was associat- ed with Russian election med- dling. Efimova's claim that Joseph Muscat's wife was the owner of a secret Panamanian company Egrant in April 2017 was nev- er proven: a costly and lengthy magisterial inquiry disproved most of the claims published by Caruana Galizia, even though it was unable to effectively prove who the company held by audi- tors Nexia BT was intended for ultimately. But that a tactic in 2017 was employed to mix the very pos- sible risk of Russian electoral meddling, with events targeting the Labour government, sug- gests a sophisticated degree of propaganda. MaltaToday was the first newspaper to pick up the re- port in Intelligence Online when it arrived in this journal- ist's (a long-time subscriber) mailbox on 24 May 2017 right in the middle of the election that kicked off straight after the Egrant allegation. Muscat was asked about the report, obliging that he was "aware of informa- tion from foreign intelligence services, of alleged Russian meddling in Malta's election". "All I know is that we were told to expect retribution for our role in hastening the visa waiver programme for Ukraine and after we stopped the refuel- ling of a Russian warship on the way to Syria," Muscat said. Echoing IntelligenceOnline. com's report, Muscat said this information came from foreign agencies – supposedly MI6 and the CIA. And although no connection was proven, Intel- ligence Online namedropped 'Maria E' and her employment Threads of 'truthiness': Russian assassination plot hailed from Castille

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