The police have finally caught up with former Labour Party treasurer Joe Sammut, the famous – or should that be infamous – Mosta accountant who handled the financial affairs of members of the Gaddafi family, particularly those of the luridly awful Mutassim Gaddafi, now dead. Sammut had enjoyed boasting about how he met Snoop Dogg after contracting him to perform at a party which Mutassim Gaddafi threw. He was thrilled to report that Snoop Dogg had called him Smokin’ Joe. He also processed the payment made to Beyoncé when she sang at another of Gaddafi’s parties, this time in St Barts in the Caribbean. News of that performance was bad PR for Beyoncé; she ended up donating her fees to charity to dampen down the outrage.
But it isn’t because of his financial dealings with the Gaddafis that the police are now after him. It’s because of the way he is setting up what are known as ‘brass-plate’ companies which then allow Libyan citizens to obtain residence in Malta, based on the fiction that these are real businesses. The Malta Independent reports that over the last few months, Sammut has set up at least 850 of these brass-plate companies, and his fees for each one are €7,500. That’s a cool €6.4 million in fees in recent months, which means that Sammut – who made his contacts with the Gaddafis via his position as the Labour Party’s treasurer – has found another Libyan income stream to make up for the one he lost when the Gaddafis were overthrown and killed, imprisoned or forced into exile.
Joe Sammut’s problems with the police don’t seem to have been the result of some major and intensive investigation into his long-suspicious activities. They began purely by chance, when one of his clients was arrested and prosecuted a few days ago for giving false company information when he applied for a residence permit. He pleaded guilty and will be deported. The prosecuting officer said that the police had no basis to arraign Joe Sammut, who registered the company, because he had been given false information and had not falsified it himself. But the magistrate pointed out that his client could speak no English at all and was in fact at that moment using an interpreter in court – yet Sammut had declared in the application that his client was able to speak English when he obviously knew through dealing with him that he could not.
It then seems to have dawned on the police that if Joe Sammut had given false information for this Libyan client, then he is likely to have given false information for others, too. Possibly, they would then have done what journalists have been doing already, and gone to the Malta Financial Services Authority for a list of the companies he has registered for Libyan citizens, and found that he has registered a full 850. This is in itself a major red flag, and the big question is why the Malta Financial Services Authority, which is the state authority responsible for the registration of companies, did not raise the alert itself with the police.
The MFSA amazes me: it has all these ‘know your client’ rules, supposed safeguards against money-laundering, and then itself fails to put in place a reporting system which alerts the police to suspected crimes. We already saw its lack of ‘fail-safe’ procedures when senior police officers like Ray, Daniel and Roderick Zammit were able to register companies in which they are shareholders completely undetected by the Malta Financial Services Authority itself.
You would think that at the very least, in this big software age, the police force and the MFSA would be able to cooperate on a system in which the identity card numbers of all serving police officers are programmed into the Companies Registration system so that they are flagged up if anyone with that ID card number tries to register as a shareholder, director or other official of a company. This is so basic that I can’t understand why it has not been done already. It is the obvious thing to do because police officers are barred from involvement in companies unless they have the express permission of the Commissioner of Police. Those who have that permission will then be able to take it to the MFSA in writing to over-ride the flagging-up of their ID number.
As for Joe Sammut and his 850 companies for Libyan citizens, the police really have to go into why the Malta Financial Services Authority did not flag that up, either. It could be pure and utter negligence, or it could be corruption.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com