Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/737583
2 maltatoday, WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2016 News Tal-Villagg Cafe & Wine Lounge 77, Triq il-Forn, Lija Tel: 27427058 • 9940 4487 Email: talvillagg@gmail.com talvillagglounge Soogea suspected of trafficking drugs and money laundering CONTINUES FROM PAGE 1 The cash that f lowed into Capi- talOne was also used to pay off Soogea's credit cards, and finally in 2016, Baltimore sold off CapitalOne's entire share- holding to Ioannis Moustos. • In February 2009, the com- pany gave notice that it was raising authorised share capi- tal from €50,000 to €200 mil- lion. • In August 2009, it received €489,000 from a Greek associ- ate that was later paid out a week later to acquire €490,000 in the Greek firm Asbavel. • In November and De- cember 2009, it received €1 million in deposits from the firm Logistics SA in five pay- ments. Over December 2009, €200,000 was paid out to ac- quire 70% of a tourism com- pany GATS, and thereafter another €250,000 to increase its share capital. • In January 2010, it received €1 million in deposit from a fur coats merchant, Agar Srl, in Poggibonsi, Italy, which the next day was deposited into a Valletta Fund Management account. • Over the course of 2010, €2.3 million was used to in- crease share capital in GATS, which was later absorbed by another Greek company. • Payments of €610,000 al- so came to CapitalOne from Gillesa Shipping, a firm which Dutch police said also belonged to Rob- ert Soogea; and €1 million from MNS C o m m e r - cial Bro- kers of Dubai. During all this time, the Nationalist MP Beppe Fene- ch Adami was a director of Baltimore Fiduciary Ser- vices up until January 2014, a month after the police file was marked 'PU' – put away. As MaltaToday has written before, Fenech Adami 's signa- ture does not appear in any of the faxed instructions to Bank of Valletta on CapitalOne's behalf. When police presented its report to their superiors, in- vestigators pointed out that Soogea was suspected in the illicit trafficking of narcotic drugs and psychotropic sub- stances, and laundering of the proceeds of crime. They also made note in their conclusions that one of the Baltimore Fiduciary directors was a PEP – politically ex- posed person – and said the information should be for- warded to the Europol office. Dutch police had alerted the Maltese of suspicions of alleged drug trafficking when it arrested Robert Soogea PN: Muscat zeal for CapitalOne inquiry should extend to Panamagate MATTHEW VELLA THE Nationalist Party yesterday called on the Prime Minister to show the same zeal with which he launched an inquiry into a side-lined police investigation into money laundering, into other scandals that have hit his govern- ment since its election in 2013. The PN's statements comes in the wake of the inquiry launched into a police investigation into CapitalOne Investment Group, a company once owned by Bal- timore Fiduciary Services at a time when one of its director was Beppe Fenech Adami, today the PN's deputy leader for party af- fairs. At the time of the money laun- dering investigation in January 2013, Fenech Adami was serv- ing as parliamentary assistant for home affairs. The PN has hit back, insisting that Joseph Muscat should have held inquiries into countless other cases of political malfeasance, among them the offshore Panama companies opened by minister Konrad Mizzi and chief of staff Keith Schembri, and allegations of wrongdoing in the issuance of medical visas to Libyans, travel vi- sas to Algerian nationals, and an alleged 14,000 residence permits for Libyans issued through the of- fices of Joe Sammut. The latter case is under investi- gation by police and charges have been filed in court, while other calls for inquiries into Café Pre- mier were dealt with by the Na- tional Audit Office. The PN also said Muscat should hold an inquiry into his chief of staff 's commercial interest in ser- vicing printing machinery that could be supplied to the Crane Currency factory in Malta; and his role in securing the Banif Bank sale to an Qatari conglomerate. It also said the government should hold an inquiry into the decision by FIAU director Man- fred Galdes to leave his public sec- tor job to move to a money laun- dering unit opened by legal firm Fenech Farrugia Fiott. The PN is still insisting a Mal- taToday story that revealed the discontinued police investigation into CapitalOne, is a "government propaganda" intended at deviating from the arrival of an LNG tanker in Marsaxlokk that will be fuel- ling the new Delimara gas plant. "This inquiry is a fascist attack to intimidate the Opposition be- cause the government is not ready to hold inquiries that would un- cover the dirt inside its own ad- ministration." Fenech Adami was clear on the role of a fiduciary during the 2013 oil scandal MATTHEW VELLA THREE years ago Nationalist MP Beppe Fenech Adami was aware of what the legal obligations of a fiduciary company were, when on 1 March 2013 during the gen- eral election he expounded on the legal obligations of Intershore fiduciary – a nominee company that held the shareholding of Ai- kon Ltd, to hide the identity of its beneficial owner, the rogue oil trader George Farrugia. Weeks earlier in January 2013, Fenech Adami was listed as a PEP – politically exposed per- son – in the report of a police investigation dealing with a client of the fiduciary he was a director of. Fenech Adami has the benefit of the doubt since it appears he was less hands-on when it came to Baltimore Fiduciary's operations with respect to CapitalOne: it was co-director Richard Abdilla Cas- tillo who executed CapitalOne's instructions to effect payments and deposit large sums of money inside a Valletta Fund Manage- ment account. But by Fenech Adami's own yardstick, he himself may have to answer for CapitalOne's affairs, as comments he made back in March 2013 show. The relevant sound-clip can be found on a One News item posted on YouTube, where Fenech Ada- mi is explaining to the Labour press that Intershore's directors, as controllers of the fiduciary that was handling George Farrugia's affairs, were responsible for what was happening in Aikon Ltd. His statement was made after the former assistant commission- er Michael Cassar had stated in court that Intershore had nothing to do with Farrugia's suspicious activities. It had been a sore point for the directors of Intershore, which in- cluded Joe Cordina – a treasurer of the Labour Party who gave up his 2013 electoral candidature – who sued for libel Tonio Fenech, for claiming that "Intershore was behind the oil scandal." "Joe Cordina is not just a Labour activist… but the party's finan- cial administrator," Fenech said, labouring on Cordina's political role. "A financial administrator is not someone who just signs the cheques. He administers finances and looks for party funds." That was on 23 February – a month since MaltaToday broke news of the oil scandal. Then on 1 March, 2013, Beppe Fenech Adami said this: "As a fact Intershore was the nominee com- pany administering Aikon, that in itself – without getting too legalistic – creates many obliga- tions on the nominee company towards the client it is working for, and from the criminal, civil and commercially legal aspect you are not correct when saying that Intershore had no responsi- bility in this case." That meant that Fenech Adami was insisting that the nominee company had to answer for the actions of Aikon and its real own- er, George Farrugia. This may be perhaps what did not take place only weeks before he made this statement, when the Maltese police were told on 13 January 2013 that Fenech Adami was the director of Baltimore, whose client CapitalOne could have effecting suspicious mon- etary transactions. Beppe Fenech Adami