Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1518068
2 NEWS maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 27 MARCH 2024 2 'Prohibited migrant' Alberto Chang Rajii used virtual card to make €10,664 in unauthorised purchases Myriam Spiteri Debono to be next president after Labour and Nationalist MPs signal agreement NOTORIOUS Chilean 'investor' Alberto Chang Rajii used a virtual credit card to make €10,664 worth of unauthorised transactions from a former acquaintance's account and is currently in Malta illegally, a court was told on Tuesday. This emerged from the first sitting in the compilation of evidence against Chang Ra- jii, earlier today. The defendant, who was dubbed the 'Chilean Bernie Madoff' over his connection with a ponzi scheme in his home country in the early 2000s, was charged ear- lier this month in Malta with offences related to fraud and aggravated theft. Chang is wanted in Chile to face criminal proceedings for tax evasion and multi-mil- lion dollar fraud through a Ponzi scheme, but an extradition attempt had been blocked by the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2018. More charges - relating to additional al- leged victims - were also added on Tuesday. The victim of the credit card fraud, Kevin Decesare, took the witness stand before magistrate Gabriella Vella on Tuesday. De- cesare, who described himself as a consult- ant with a leisure company, was asked about what had led him to file the police report that led to Chang Rajii's arrest. "I had been in a meeting and ten minutes after the meeting ended, I received an alert on my phone about a banking transaction having been done at a place called Inhawi. It was for €540." "Was it done by you?" asked prosecutor Claire Sammut, who is representing the Of- fice of the Attorney General in the proceed- ings. "No. Absolutely not," Decesare replied. "I managed to find out that Inhawi was a hostel and so I called its number but the reception- ist could not give me any information, so I asked for the manager. The manager told Decesare that she could not reveal who made the transaction because of data protection regulations. "I said 'look, I'm going to come there and try and sort it out.' When I told her this, she said, 'I cannot give you any information, so you will have to bring the police with you." Decesare asked for the assistance of police officers from the St. Julians police station, who accompanied him to the hostel and spoke with the manager, while Decesare waited outside. "At one point, I saw Alberto Chang," said the witness, who explained that he knew Chang Rajii from the Chilean's unsuccessful bid to acquire Maltese citizenship. "Around 2015 he had come to Malta to ac- quire a passport and had rented a flat from me through Henley and Partners… I had dealt with Henley. It was a six-year contract and that was it," Decesare said, adding that he hadn't spoken to the defendant since 2022. Decesare said he had initially been unde- cided as to whether to report Chang Rajii to the police over the missing money. "But then I went back through my accounts and discovered some €10,664 missing." The hefty total was made up of small transactions made every day, mostly from online stores and the like, Decesare explained. "Because they were such small amounts, they didn't trigger an alert." But over the space of a few months the amounts transacted had suddenly increased to around €400, said the witness, surmising that this was because Chang Rajii had real- ised that the unauthorised transactions wer- en't being noticed. The witness was shown bank statements for his card, which he confirmed as genuine. Only he would use the card in question, he said, and denied that he made the transac- tions. "I had time to think about how this hap- pened. Chang would need to buy small things, like Netflix, and would ask me for my credit card which I would hand over and then take back. The victim had been renting a property to Chang at the time, he explained. "He was very chummy. It came as a shock." "He had a lot on his mind at the time. There was an extradition process going on… I got on with him, he's very intelligent, he knows a lot about a lot of things so when this hap- pened, I was dumbfounded." Cross-examined by Chang Rajii's lawyer, Ilona Schembri, the witness said that a sim- ilar situation had happened to him once be- fore, when someone in Japan had misused a credit card of his. Dealing with the bank to rectify the situation had taken Decesare an hour and a half that time, he said and he had therefore been reluctant to go through that process again. As a result, Decesare hadn't called the bank to cancel the card after discovering the un- authorised €560 transaction, but went to the police instead. "I went to the police station. Five minutes to get there, then five minutes to Inhawi. In that ten minutes, I realised who was using the card, I gave it to the police, and the card was frozen." "I would always carry the card with me. I didn't think it could happen." Pressed by Schembri as to why he hadn't noticed previous transactions which he had highlighted to the police as suspicious, Dece- sare said that his secretary would handle his bank statements. "If I had looked at the statements, it wouldn't have taken me twelve months to find out." Decesare told the court that the amount Chang Rajii had allegedly defrauded from him was €10,600. When the lawyer suggest- ed that Decesare would pay for Chang Rajii's expenses, he replied that he hadn't done so for several years. "In the first five years, when he would ask me if I could get him this and that, I would oblige." The prosecution asked Decesare whether he had authorised anyone to carry out card transactions on his behalf. "Absolutely no," replied the alleged victim. A representative of the Identita' agency told the court that the only application in Chang Rajii's name that appeared on the agency's system had been submitted in August 2015 and was valid until Jan 2017. "It was a tem- porary permit, he could not work in Malta," explained the witness. "He was granted a temporary permit which expired in 2017." Records showed that the permit had been revoked with a note which referred to an "email from Mr. Spagnol," said the witness, but explained that the email itself could not be traced. When the last witness stepped off the stand on Tuesday, the prosecution informed the court that it had no further evidence to pres- ent. The court issued a ruling, stating that it deemed there to be sufficient reasons for Chang Rajii to be placed under a bill of in- dictment before the competent court. Chang remains in custody, with no request for bail having been filed since his arraign- ment. Alberto Chang Rajii (centre) used a virtual credit card to make €10,664 worth of unauthorised transactions from a former acquaintance's account MPS from both sides of the House sig- nalled their intention to support Myriam Spiteri Debono's nomination for presi- dent in meetings of the respective parlia- mentary groups on Tuesday. Labour MPs meeting at party headquar- ters in Hamrun were informed by Prime Minister Robert Abela of Spiteri Debono's nomination and gave the green light to the former Speaker. Down the road in Pieta, PN MPs meeting at the Stamperija also signalled their sup- port for Spiteri Debono's nomination in a short uneventful meeting. In a joint statement, the Office of the Prime Minister and the Office of the Oppo- sition Leader said the vote in parliament on Spiteri Debono's nomination will take place on Wednesday 27 March. This is ostensi- bly the first time ever that a joint statement between the OPM and the Opposition has been issued. "Earlier today, in separate meetings, the respective parliamentary groups sealed the agreement reached between the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader," the statement said. It added that the two leaders also agreed that whenever an acting president is re- quired to be appointed, the Prime Minister will be tasking former PN minister Francis Zammit Dimech with the role. Spiteri Debono, 72, will be replacing George Vella whose term ends on 4 April. She will require a two-thirds majority in parliament, something that is guaranteed following the cross-party agreement. Spiteri Debono was Speaker of the House between 1996 and 1998 and had also been a candidate for the Labour Party in the past. Myriam Spiteri Debono