Keith Schembri’s phone goes missing for weeks before being found in separate case file

Lawyers for former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri have filed constitutional proceedings, claiming that his right to a fair hearing has been breached and requesting the removal from evidence in his money laundering case of a mobile phone that had disappeared for several weeks before turning up amongst the exhibits in a separate case.

In the application filed against the Attorney General, the Police Commissioner and the Registrar Criminal Courts and Tribunals, Schembri demanded the phone to be expunged from the evidence in the case against him, suggesting that there was a sinister motive behind the misplacing and subsequent discovery of his phone.

The case against Schembri, his father Alfio Schembri and business associates, Robert Zammit and Malcolm Scerri, has been stuck for weeks while the Attorney General deliberates on whether to indict the men in the Criminal Court or send the case before the Court of Magistrates for judgment.

In a sitting several weeks ago, Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech who is presiding over the compilation of evidence in the money laundering case was informed by the prosecuting lawyer that Schembri’s phone, which had been seized by the police as part of the investigation into suspected financial crimes, was not in the case file.

The magistrate subsequently ordered the court expert who had examined the phone to testify in the hope of locating the missing device, but the expert in question told the court that although he had examined it, he did not know where it went after he had completed the examination ordered by the court.

“Magistrate Frendo Dimech said that she would be requesting a magisterial inquiry into the phone’s disappearance, but then postponed the sitting briefly in order to ‘look for the mobile phone in [her] chambers,’” reads the application.

Just over a quarter of an hour later, Schembri’s lawyers were informed that the missing phone had been found after ending up with the exhibits in the separate case against the directors of Zenith Finance, Matthew Pace and Lorraine Falzon.

Schembri’s lawyers pointed out, however, that the records of the Zenith case had already been sent to the Criminal Court at that time since Pace and Falzon had chosen to be tried.

Magistrate Frendo Dimech had dictated a minute after the phone was found, slamming the Justice minister for the sorry state of the conditions in which evidence was stored, describing it as “shameful and embarrassing,” with exhibits strewn on the floor, in unsealed bags and, in some cases, mouldy.

But Schembri’s lawyers observed that not long after that incident, lawyers representing an unnamed third party in separate criminal proceedings filed an application to the Criminal Court for authorisation to request that Schembri’s phone be exhibited as evidence in those separate proceedings.

The timing of the phone’s vanishing and subsequent re-appearance raised suspicions as to what had really happened “behind the scenes”, said Schembri’s lawyers, arguing that the device’s vanishing for several weeks raised doubts about the chain of custody of his phone and pointed to grave deficiencies in the manner in which the case against Schembri was being handled.

This, in turn, raised doubts as to the integrity of the data contained in this important exhibit, argued the lawyers, who went on to describe the fact that the phone was then found within minutes as “inexplicable.”

The exhibit’s handling rendered it inadmissible as evidence at best and pointed to “illegal and possibly criminal behaviour” at worst, said the lawyers, suggesting that what happened was far more serious than simply bad administration.

In addition to the expunging of the phone from evidence, the court was asked to declare that Schembri had suffered a breach of his rights and to award moral damages or take other steps accordingly.

This is the second incident where Schembri’s phone has gone missing, the first time being at the time of his arrest in November of 2019 in connection with the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

That time, Schembri had told the police that he had misplaced the device.