Sammut indicted on fraud, money laundering • told police they were ‘scaring away investment’

Auditor and accountant, 58, who set up shell companies for Libyans to bypass residency requirements, to be indicted on fraud and money laundering.

Joe Sammut (Photo: Ray Attard)
Joe Sammut (Photo: Ray Attard)

A court has been told how accountant Joe Sammut had accused police officers who ere investigating him of money laundering and fraud, of "scaring away foreign investment."

The compilation of evidence against Sammut, who is accused of helping Libyan nationals set up shell companies in Malta to facilitate their obtaining Maltese work permits, continued today Thursday.

At the end of this afternoon’s sitting, Magistrate Doreen Clarke ruled that was sufficient prima facie evidence to indict Sammut, 58.

Superintendent Paul Vassallo and inspector Jonathan Ferris testified, explaining that police inspector Lara Butters had retrieved a number of files from Sammut’s office, documenting breaches which had occurred “with Sammut’s blessing”. A pile of documents of measuring approximately one metre by 1.5 metres was exhibited in three sealed evidence bags. The bags, said Inspector Ferris, contained the documentation about every company mentioned in Sammut’s charge sheet.

“I took issue with Sammut’s assertion that this investigation was harming foreign investment in Malta,” Ferris said, “and I had replied that since these companies were not operating in Malta, no investment was being lost.”

He explained that such was the volume of documentation related to the case that the process of opening the evidence bags and photocopying the contents alone took three days.

Superintendent Vassallo explained that the police had begun investigating at the beginning of August 2015 when the Citizenship and Expatriate Affairs department had sent a list of 60 companies it had flagged applying for work permits. While processing these applications, the department had noted that many companies were providing one of a group of 14 addresses.

Vassallo learned that none of the companies were actually operating from these addresses, which meant that the applicants had made a false declaration to a public authority and so the police began investigating.

In the course of this investigation he had found that Sammut had aided many of the companies obtain permission to bypass the legal €100,000 minimum investment requirement for a residency permit, by fabricating evidence that the amount had been invested as stock bought from Malta.

The ghost stock allegedly purchased ranged from €100,000 worth of medicinals to that amount worth of tuna fish. Subsequent checks with the suppliers listed confirmed his suspicions that in the majority of the cases, nowhere near those amounts had been purchased.

Ferris told the court that he believed that Sammut was cutting corners on due diligence checks, using the unrest in Libya as an excuse. “In his own words, he said that in Libya, everyone knows everyone and so he had spoken to some friends there to verify the identity of the applicants.”

The prosecution summoned as witnesses three female employees of Sammut’s, Wendy Zammit, Eva Calleja and  Charlotte Micallef. The women, who the court heard are currently effectively unemployed as a result of the investigation, however elected not to testify, using their legal right not to incriminate themselves. Micallef handed her copy of the office keys back to the defence in court.

Defence lawyers Michael Sciriha, Martin Fenech and Simon Micallef Stafrace are expected to summon their first batch of witnesses when the court resumes hearing the case on 9th October.