Last week, John Dalli’s more notorious brother Sebastian was in the news again after a period of relative quiet. This was after an Italian newspaper published a report about that country’s anti-Mafia investigators’ concern at the way the legitimate online casino industry had become a magnet for the laundering of money made illicitly by criminal organisations. The report quoted tapped telephone conversations in which members of two Camorra (the Neapolitan crime network) families discussed registering an online casino business in Malta. One gives the other a telephone number, telling him that it belongs to “the brother of the Maltese prime minister”, Bastian Dalli, saying that he should ring him as a sort of facilitator.
Bastian Dalli’s name made it to the headline of that newspaper report, but in Malta there has been next to no follow-up, as usual. There are links to be made, though. The first and most obvious is that John Dalli’s eponymous firm, John Dalli & Associates, specialises in part in the registration and administration of online gaming and online casino businesses. There were quite a few of those which turned up when I was researching his operations in the aftermath of the Bahamas flying-visit story.
Bastian Dalli does not register online gaming or casino businesses, nor does he administer them. He is not in that line of work and he does not have the administrative back-up. So if he is approached by a member of a Camorra family to register an online casino business for that same Camorra family, to whom is he most likely to take the job? To his brother or to somebody else entirely? That is the most obvious question which must be addressed, now that his brother is a trusted confidante of the prime minister, rather than actually the prime minister as some members of the Camorra think he is.
Yet there is something else which the press really needs to follow up because the whole thing is shady. Bastian Dalli was held on remand for a time in connection with that notorious cargo of green soap, which was intercepted by the Vice Squad in a night-time operation off Fawwara a few years ago. Dalli and his fellow conspirators thought they were smuggling cannabis resin, only to discover during the police raid that their suppliers in Libya had cheated them blind. What has become of that case? It has dropped out of sight and there have been no reports in the newspapers. Meanwhile, Bastian Dalli is running about.
Compare this situation to the way Daniel Holmes, for his random cannabis plants, has been banged up for 10 years in a highly publicised trial. Bastian Dalli is investigated and even held on remand for smuggling into Malta from Libya what he thinks is a cargo of cannabis resin, and we hear nothing more about it. What happened?
At this point I should point out that the fact that it wasn’t actually cannabis resin after all is no longer a defence under trial. That loophole in the law was closed after one Godfrey Ellul, who brought cocaine into Malta in a suitcase through the airport, pleaded that he thought he was smuggling emeralds. A judge, Noel Arrigo, had actually taken the witness stand in his defence, saying that he knew him to be a decent person and so on – an early warning sign of what would come next with Judge Arrigo, though most people seemed to think nothing of a judge being a character witness in court for a cocaine trafficker who thought he was only smuggling emeralds. Now, ignorance of your cargo is no defence. If it were, every drug mule would be able to claim that he or she did not know what was in that suitcase. Bastian Dalli’s (and his conspirators’) situation is made worse by the fact that they – allegedly – actually thought they were importing illegal drugs and therefore the intention was expressly and manifestly there. But either way, the fact that his brother is such an important personage from whom he is not estranged makes this very much a public interest issue. Bastian Dalli, incidentally, is one of the reasons why I opposed John Dalli’s appointment as EU Commissioner. One does not get rid of one’s own problems by inflicting them on others, in a situation where the consequences can and almost certainly will be exponentially worse (as indeed happened).
The press should – given the resurrection of John Dalli as the prime minister’s man – begin keeping close tabs on his brother, who has a long history of shady behaviour. If the two were estranged, it would be a different matter. But they are not estranged. And if Bastian Dalli is known to members of the Camorra as somebody who can help with the registration of online casinos in Malta – as emerges from a conversation recorded by Italian anti-Mafia investigators – the press have to begin asking why that would be.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com