Former PN minister and European Commissioner John Dalli is seeking answers from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists after the publication of what are known as the Pandora Papers, in which it was revealed that when he was an MP owned a secret offshore company.

In a letter to the ICIJ managing editor Gergus Shiel (copied to media), in reference to what he described as a “hate article”, Dalli said that once the article is stripped of all the innuendos, “the core accusation is that I did not report to parliament the existence of an inactive company which was finally struck off because the purpose for which it was formed did not materialise”.

Times of Malta on Sunday afternoon reported that Dalli used nominee services provided by the Panama law firm Alcogal to hide his ownership of the BVI company Westmead Overseas Limited.  

He said he will not be “sending any answer to the fake paper… as these hypocrites who push themselves as crusaders of free speech have refused to publish any replies I send to them”.

Instead, he attached correspondence with other ICIJ journalists in which he asked questions on both Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb in October 2017, and her son Matthew, who worked for ICIJ. 

The questions were about whether Matthew Caruana Galizis is still employed with ICIJ and whether the organisation approved of his passing on information on the Panama Papers investigation to his mother. He also asked about whether ICIJ were informed about Daphne Caruana Galizia’s “20 years of persecution (of Dalli) as she tried to frame me in every scandal she cooked”.