Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  Politically, this was extremely damaging to the Nationalist government. Solutions could not come in the short term. Switching to renewables would have only had a cosmetic impact on cost. Switching to gas would have transferred to a fuel that was consistently cheaper than oil but would have still meant replacing one vulnerability with another.

  The Nationalists decided to lay an undersea cable to Sicily which would connect Malta to the European electricity grid and allow locals to use electricity generated elsewhere in Europe for the best price and the lowest carbon footprint that could be secured. They preferred this option over isolated systems, even if possibly cleaner and cheaper such as gas, thereby frustrating Dalli’s hopes of brokering a deal for his ‘clients’ or ‘partners’.

  Dalli did not give up. He crossed over to the PL in opposition, a party that for years had made him the subject of mockery, criticism, and what can only be described as enmity. He presented his project to Joseph Muscat, who was already being touted as the next prime minister and was in a position to procure Dalli’s proposed project.

  Dalli did not keep his intentions under wraps. He appeared on the PL’s TV station – a surprising move any day – to promote his project and explain why Malta’s government policy was wrong and his project was the right solution for the country. His interference in local politics at a time when he was in post as EU commissioner was hugely inappropriate.

  When he walked out of Barroso’s cabinet, Dalli had 10 minutes to leave the building. During that time he made one phone call, to the then leader of the opposition Joseph Muscat (PL). OLAF communicated its findings to Peter Grech, the attorney general in Malta who, in turn, passed the report to Malta’s police chief.

  After reviewing the facts, the commissioner of police said there was enough evidence to warrant a conversation with Dalli at police headquarters. But Dalli claimed he was too unwell to travel to Malta and presented a series of medical certificates signed by a German doctor from Mettlach-Wehringen, a village in Saarland. Doctor Michael Scholten certified John Dalli unfit to travel. He is a gynaecologist.

  At a parliamentary hearing some time later, Rizzo said he had intended to charge Dalli with trading in influence, legalese for corruption and abuse of power. But something got in the way of that aim. Muscat, having won the election, was sworn in as prime minister on the 10 March 2013 and a month later Rizzo was summarily dismissed.

  Around this time Dalli made a miraculous recovery from his condition and flew back to Malta. He knew he was safe. Rizzo was replaced as chief of police by PL patsy Peter Paul Zammit. Zammit was a former police officer turned lawyer who had left the force some time previously and so was an outside appointee.

  Within six weeks of taking office, Zammit announced that Dalli had no case to answer, and in November 2013 Dalli was appointed chief advisor to the government on health matters by Muscat.

  Meanwhile Dalli lambasted Barroso for firing him ‘unjustly’ at every opportunity in an absurd campaign unencumbered by any real evidence. He told The Malta Independent that Barroso should be arrested if he ever set foot in Malta:

  This is nothing but a media campaign organised by the Commission and OLAF to slander and intimidate me. Another conclusion that I arrive at is that Dr BS is part of this campaign. I am considering publishing the correspondence that I have with OLAF and part of which has not yet been replied to by OLAF and to take further appropriate action.

  ‘Dr BS’ was John Dalli’s way of referring to the Nationalist leader of the opposition Simon Busuttil, who was leading John Dalli’s former party.

  Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote in reaction:

  … the man is obviously not all there. Some crisis must have been triggered off by the catastrophe of the 2004 PN leadership election and he has been left undiagnosed and untreated all this time, becoming progressively worse and more paranoid and delusional.

  Unfortunately, in Malta we are so accustomed to abnormal behaviour that we treat it as normal or think of it as unremarkable, and it is only when we come face to face with the astonishment of outsiders that we are brought up short. The fact of the matter is that Dalli’s behaviour indicates he is in need of psychiatric help.

  Daphne’s words must have stung.

  And then she went on to break the story of yet another Dalli scandal.

  In 2015 Daphne reported that Dalli and his two daughters, Claire Gauci Borda and Louisa Dalli, were embroiled in a Ponzi scheme in the United States. The three Dallis and an American confidence trickster called Elouise Marie Corbin Klein who used various aliases such as Lady Bird, Mary Swann, and Eloisa Chihan, had allegedly cheated an evangelical Christian community called Joy Ministries out of their life savings. The depositors in the schemes, a group of elderly Americans, believed they were paying seed money that would go into ethical gold mines which would fund improvements for the lives of their employees.

  The victims were told the money would go to poor miners in Africa and the Philippines who were not be able to get bank loans to start their businesses. But the money, conservatively estimated at around $600,000 but probably a lot more than that, flowed into financial structures set up by Dalli’s daughters. Daphne’s source had told her that the margin on the currency conversion alone amounted to $2m.

  Daphne published a photo showing John and Louisa Dalli with Corbin Klein also known as Lady Bird in the Bahamas in 2012. At the time, John Dalli was still an EU commissioner and had flown to the Bahamas and back from an EU meeting in Cyprus. He tried claiming his flight ticket expenses from the European Commission but got caught.

  Daphne showed the picture to the two Danish journalists, Brugger and Bertelman.

  Dalli, she said, was at an EU Commission meeting in Cyprus. He made his excuses and left, he wasn’t present for one of the most important dinners, he told his EU Commission colleagues that he was going back to Malta because he had family problems. But he didn’t go back to Malta at all. He went to the Bahamas. I know why he went because I spoke to the Americans who were there in the Bahamas who met him.

  The film cuts to the photo. Daphne explains: ‘That is Elouise Marie Corbin Klein, also known as the fraudster Lady Bird, that is John Dalli, that is his daughter, Louisa Dalli. So this man standing at the back, in the blue shirt, he represents a Christian organisation.’ The organisation was the Joy Ministries, whose adherents say they were defrauded by the Dallis.

  Daphne claimed Lady Bird had multiple identities, including one on a Filipino passport. Although the woman in the Filipino passport photograph had blonde hair and looked Caucasian, the name on the passport was Filipino. It was an obvious fraud.

  Brugger asked Daphne whether the Dallis would have known that she was a fraudster. Daphne said Lady Bird had arrived in Malta after being released from a prison in Thailand. Dalli told the Danes that he knew about the prison sentence in Thailand but thought she’d had a problem with her passport.

  ‘Because of her fake identities?’ asked Brugger.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Dalli.

  When the Danish journalists confronted Dalli with evidence of the fraud committed by Lady Bird, with his help, Dalli countered that the Joy Ministries victim ‘had been contacted by Daphne Caruana Galizia and brainwashed by her’.

  One of the investors from the Joy Ministries was a woman who invested her lifetime pension, sending $400,000 to an account in Malta. The money was supposedly destined for a gold mine in Africa; the profits rolled over. Eventually she received a letter saying that the whole thing was a scam. The investor now believes that she was conned by Corbin Klein, also known as Lady Bird.

  Dalli claimed the investor had been brainwashed by Giovanni Kessler, then boss of the European anti-fraud office OLAF, and Daphne.

  Why would the American Christian pensioners want to hurt you, Brugger asked him.

  ‘Because they were roped in by Kessler and Daphne Caruana Galizia, who is one of my arch enemies in Malta,’ he replied. The fraud victims have evidence that they sent money to ban
k accounts in Malta and that some of the money ended up in entities run by Dalli’s daughters and registered at his home address. There is no credible evidence to support Dalli’s version of events or his allegations about Kessler or Daphne.

  No charges were filed against Dalli in this case either. Daphne had been dead for a year when her story about the Joy Ministries Ponzi scheme led to action in court. Criminal charges were filed in Malta in November 2018 against the Dalli sisters, Corbin Klein also known as Lady Bird, and others for money laundering, misappropriation, and fraud. The defendants deny the charges and the case is still ongoing.

  The Americans, who see themselves as victims of a swindle, told authorities they were given instructions on where and how to transfer funds directly from Dalli’s daughter Claire.

  Brugger told the authors of this book:

  I consider Daphne to be one of the most courageous human beings I have ever encountered. It was basically her against the entire gangster state of Malta. In my mind she was the embodiment of what a real journalist should be: relentlessly in pursuit of truth, no matter what the cost might be.

  In December 2016, Dalli’s lawyers wrote to Daphne, warning her they believed she was writing with the ‘premeditated intent to embarrass him, ridicule him, instigate people against him, ruin him financially, and destroy the respect which he has won with such hard work and effort for the country over decades.’ The letter said Dalli felt harassed by her undue interest in him and asked her to remove all references to him on her blog and not to write about him ever again. Otherwise he would request the police to prosecute her for a series of crimes he believed she had committed against him.

  Daphne responded in the way she always did in these situations: by publishing the letter and reminding her readers that:

  now you have some understanding of why journalists in this country buckle under so quickly, when people in a position of great power on an island with few to no institutional safeguards, use the threat of prosecution so abusively. And note that he speaks about prosecution for harassment – the police – and nowhere does he mention a civil suit for libel.

  Ten months later Daphne Caruana Galizia was dead. But for Dalli, that was not the end.

  ‘Do not speak ill of the dead’ is a wisdom not followed by John Dalli. Two weeks after her death, he wrote a letter to The Times of Malta headlined ‘Resilience conquers poison pens – John Dalli’. There was a lot of guff in it about Mother Theresa and the primacy of life and godliness. But the nub of it was appalling.

  Life is life, fight for it. Destroy this and it is as much of a murder as if a person’s heart was pierced with a dagger. Poison pens do just that.

  For his Maltese readership, Dalli’s phrase ‘poison pens’ was a clear reference to Daphne. Dalli continued:

  This concept was affirmed by Pope Francis when he addressed about 400 journalists in September 2016. He also defined poison pens as terrorists. The life of a person unjustly defamed can be destroyed forever.

  John Dalli goes on to quote Pope Francis:

  ‘I have often spoken of rumours as terrorism, of how you can kill a person with the tongue. If this is valid for the individual person, in the family, or at work, so much more is it valid for journalists because their voice can reach everyone and this is a very powerful weapon…’

  And then John Dalli goes on with his very specific breed of logic:

  Journalism in Malta has strayed a good deal from the papal standard. A poison pen is not a sporadic, individualistic initiative. It is usually an organised activity controlled and manipulated by a megalomaniac who knows that brainwashing the people through the media to demonise his adversaries or those whom he considers a threat to his ambitions is vital to achieve his aims.

  Recognising this, Pope Francis, in the same address to journalists, said: ‘It is important to always reflect on the fact that, across history, dictatorships – of any orientation or colour – have always tried to not only take control of the media but also to impose new rules to the profession.’ This is what is happening in Malta.

  And then the one key phrase in Dalli’s letter:

  No one has the right to take life. Except to preserve life. Likewise in self-defence.

  Behind the mumbo jumbo and references to saints dead and living, there’s a thinly-veiled and chilling justification that those who have been ‘killed by a poison pen’ may be excused for retaliating by killing the writer in self-defence.

  The letter to The Times of Malta does not amount to a confession. But like a rag-tag band of terrorists that claims responsibility for an atrocity because they wish they’d carried it out in the first place, John Dalli seems to want us to believe he had Daphne Caruana Galizia assassinated.

  Or that at least he wished he had.

  THE ARTFUL DODGER

  It is one of the many quirks of Maltese law that libel suits are classed like all other civil debt recovery suits. By nature they seek damages, and liability is inherited if the defendant dies. So, in Malta, you can sue the dead for libel.

  Daphne Caruana Galizia died intestate which meant her husband and three sons automatically inherited her estate. At the time of her death, 42 civil libel suits were part of that estate and they had to accept liability for the suits or give up their claim to her legacy altogether.

  Defending libel suits essentially amounts to proving the truth of the claims, which becomes very difficult for the heirs of libel suits if their late loved one has not shared the evidence with them in the first place.

  Daphne’s family, however, had every intention of defending the suits. The day after her death, the father and sons were in court, in place of the mother who had been due to attend a hearing in one of the many suits she was facing. They acknowledged that they would take on responsibility and new dates were set for the cases to continue.

  The building which houses the law courts in Valletta can be found on the main street of the city known as Triq ir-Repubblika or Republic Street. As you leave the building through a pair of oversized Doric columns, you step right into the city centre, a busy pedestrian area. Across the street is a bronze memorial on a marble plinth installed in 1927. The memorial consists of three bronze figures. A tall man stands in the centre, bare-chested and square-jawed, grasping the haft of a downturned longsword in his left hand and a shield in his right. He is flanked by two modestly-clad women, one holding the head of the goddess Minerva and the other a papal tiara.

  The three figures represent valour, faith, and civilisation. The artist presumably identified these characteristics as European and stood to remind Malta’s colonial masters that Maltese people were also white, Christian, and European and did not require saving by the British.

  This proud group of figures stand stoutly on an inscription MDLXV, or 1565, the year of the Great Siege when an invasion of Ottoman Turks had been rebuffed by the combined resistance of Knights of the Order of St John and mercenaries and volunteers.

  The memorial was created by the legendary local sculptor Antonio Sciortino and the language spoken by its design is self-conscious and unambiguously political.

  That first day after Daphne’s murder schoolchildren from the San Anton School where the Caruana Galizia boys used to be students reached gingerly over the two-foot perimeter of soil that surrounds the memorial’s plinth, and rested a small A4-sized photo of Daphne against the base of the statue. In front of it, they placed flowers and touching messages on cards addressed to Daphne and her family. It is unlikely the children were thinking of the siege of 1565 as they did this.

  At lunchtime the next day, around 80 journalists congregated at one end of Triq ir-Repubblika holding up the front pages of local newspapers. The editors of the media houses in Malta, including the state broadcaster, had agreed to forgo content on their front pages, main stories, and websites and carry the sentence ‘The Pen Conquers Fear’ in white on black.

  The journalists, co-author Manuel Delia among them, walked down Triq ir-Repubblika until they reached the
law courts and addressed international reporters. They then filed a judicial protest requesting the court to ensure that Daphne’s electronic devices, computers, phones, etc, would be held securely and protected from the prying eyes of police officers trying to identify her anonymous sources.

  At the end of their short march, they left their posters and flowers against the Great Siege Monument, unwittingly turning it into that most dangerous of symbols to an authoritarian government: a shrine to a martyr. Over the next few days, other groups followed suit.

  Daphne’s remains were still with the forensic investigators. Without a funeral and a grave, the Great Siege Memorial became the focal point for mourners. The sculpture had become ‘the Daphne memorial’. It was makeshift, spontaneous, and colourful. But no less sincere for that.

  It became habitual for groups of people to visit the Valletta memorial daily and leave messages, flowers, candles or photos of Daphne. The messages were mainly calls for investigation, justice, and punishment to the perpetrators, and a continuation of her work so that the criminals she was exposing would not get away with their crimes.

  But this behaviour did not suit the Labour government, which had already started signalling that after Daphne’s death the country was going about its business as usual. The government sends city cleaners to clear the monument as often as Daphne’s supporters fill it with flowers, candles and photos. The shrine has turned into something of a battleground.

  At every opportunity Muscat did two things: express deep condolences to Daphne’s family and cast himself as the victim, repeatedly bringing up the ‘harshness’ of Daphne’s criticism of him and his wife.

  Daphne had been the first to report the allegations that his wife had received bribes from the Azerbaijani president’s family and had hidden the money in illegal offshore structures.