On Monday 11 February at 19.00, at our initiative, a public hearing on „Alleged financial crime, tax evasion and tax avoidance in Malta“ will be held.
For more than two years a corruption scandal has been smouldering in Malta, centred around two of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s closest confidants: His Chief of Staff Keith Schembri and Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi. Several leaks and the Daphne Project of investigative journalists revealed that Schembri’s secret shell company was to receive a million-dollar sum from a company called „17 Black“. To date, Schembri has not been able to refute this suspicion.
The first part of the hearing of the Special Committee of the European Parliament on Monday evening will be an exchange of views with the Maltese Minister of Justice, Owen Bonnici. The second part will feature Matthew Caruana Galizia, son of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and a journalist from the Daphne project. The Daphne Project is an association of journalists led by Forbidden Stories, which continues the investigations of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered last year.
Moneyval did not accept the invitation of the European Parliament’s special committee on the grounds that Malta was currently undergoing a mutual evaluation by Moneyval and that, therefore, there was no wish to comment publicly on Malta.
The hearing in the European Parliament in Strasbourg is open to the public. As the secretariat of the special committee TAX3 does not plan to broadcast the hearing via livestream, I will stream the hearing via my personal Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/sven.giegold