Some elderly people who live in South Carolina and are members of a Christian church have been organising themselves over the last few weeks and revealing, bit by bit, how they were scammed of their money, even of their entire life savings, by a company linked to former European Commissioner John Dalli.
These people are genuine; I have spoken to a few of them. What they describe is your typical scam/Ponzi scheme. They were first approached by a trusted member of their church - in this case, one Debbie Wicker - who revealed to them, supposedly in confidence, details of investments they could make and to which they were privy only because they were privileged. In other words, they were fortunate to be included because only those with special access to individuals like Mrs Wicker and her cohorts who got to know about these investment vehicles.
The people I spoke to were not after get-rich-quick schemes. They had their savings in deposits and investments which were yielding too low a return to make any positive difference to their retirement. They were looking for an alternative. When they were finally persuaded to part with their money - or rather, not to part with it, but to move it to this brilliant new investment vehicle in gold and gold mining - they were told to wire it to Corporate Group Ltd Client A/C 2, HSBC Bank Malta, St Julian's, Malta. Corporate Group Ltd is one of John Dalli's businesses, registered at his address in Portomaso. At the time, these American investors had no idea about Dalli's involvement and even if they had seen his name, it would have meant nothing to them and they would not have linked it to the (now former) European Commissioner.
They did ask why they were told to transfer their money to an account held in the name of Corporate Group Ltd when they had been told they would be investing with Tyre Ltd. They did not get a satisfactory answer, but 'client account' technically means that the company holding that account uses it only to deposit clients' funds and not its own funds.
Both John Dalli's daughters, Claire Gauci Borda (who was heard repeatedly prompting him off-screen during an interview with this newspaper) and Louisa Dalli were directors of Tyre Ltd but resigned when police, media and OLAF attention began to intensify and those who had been relieved of their money began chasing after it. Two of those people told me that she then changed her email address so that they could not get in touch with her. It should be pointed out that Mrs Gauci Borda sits on the board of a prominent financial services/investment advisory company, Crystal Finance Ltd. This means that the Malta Financial Services Authority, which is the regulator in these matters, has no choice but to take the accusations of theft and scamming, by another company of which she was a director at the time, very seriously indeed. We are not talking of small amounts of money here. The seven people alone who have banded together to try and retrieve some of their money have been relieved, between them, of many hundreds of thousands of US dollars. And they are just a few.
Let's make it clear. This is not a situation where people made a bad investment in a legal scheme which didn't perform as it should and so lost their money, leaving them with no claim. This is a completely illegal scam in which people are told that their money is going to be invested in the operation of gold mines in Asia, and gold-trading, when no such operation exists and the money simply disappears into the pockets of the scammers, who slip about the world under the radar and keep their 'investors' in a state of fear, warning them not to talk about it or they will never see their money again.
Some of them have now realised that they are probably never going to see their money again anyway, so they might as well talk and bring the matter to public attention. That is what they have begun to do.
The link between John Dalli and Debbie Wicker, the South Carolina church protagonist who drew those who trusted her into the scam, is the woman known variously as Mary Swan or Lady Bird (LB). There are other aliases, but these are the two by which she is known in Malta and to John Dalli and his daughters. Mary Swan is the most unlikely-seeming fraudster: elderly, white-haired, blue-eyed, scrubbed-face, plain-clothed, demure Christian demeanour, littering her speech and emails with terms like 'blessings' and 'may the blood of Jesus be visited on this'. She is the woman who Dalli flew to the Bahamas to meet. Some of the members of the church who are now speaking out have said that they have photographs of the meeting showing Dalli and Mary Swan both there together with the rest. He was a European Commissioner at the time, which is why the European Commission's investigative body is examining the matter.
Mary Swan/Lady Bird also lived in Malta for a couple of years, in a flat in Sliema's High Street, where she was known to the neighbours and her landlord as an elderly American charity worker who invested in gold mines to help impoverished children. Inside information I have tells me that she entered Malta using a Paraguayan passport under a false name. She has a history of trouble with passports and fake aliases and spent time in a Thai jail for trying to enter the country using a false The Philippines passport. The same inside information tells me that she left Malta a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, because of the obfuscation surrounding the Maltese government's bestowing of citizenship using ministerial discretion - a case in point: how Manuel Mallia made his wife a Maltese citizen when they had been married for less than two years, using his own ministerial discretion - we have no way of knowing, bar a whistleblower coming forward, whether Mary Swan (or whatever name she used to apply) left Malta as a Maltese citizen.
This case is so scandalous that I am not surprised many people cannot fully absorb the scale of it and are treating it almost like a fairytale.
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