Enemalta manager had sent stock data to George Farrugia

New emails seen by MaltaToday show that pardoned oil trader George Farrugia – who orchestrated a network of kickbacks to Enemalta state officials and other civil servants for the procurement of oil from Trafigura and Totsa – benefited from inside information on fuel stock data of competitors.

Farrugia holds a presidential pardon granted to him in February 2013 to reveal how he bribed people like MOBC chief Frank Sammut and former Enemalta chairman Tancred Tabone, for the procurement of oil from Trafigura and Totsa to Enemalta.

Emails recently published by MaltaToday, show that the corrupt oil trader – formerly a member of family firm John’s Group before his ouster – also got Trafigura executives in London to send UK premiership football tickets to another civil servant, a former director at the Malta Resources Authority, Godwin Sant, who was in charge of green-light fuel oil specifications of all imports to Malta.

Now, new emails show that an Enemalta senior manager in the petroleum division, Emanuel ‘Leli’ Mizzi, had repeatedly sent fuel stock data of competitors of oil giants Totsa and Trafigura, to their representative in Malta, George Farrugia.

The very important and vital intelligence would show how competitors of Totsa and Trafigura were trading and what stocks of fuel they had, placing Farrugia in a strategic advantage because he could foretell when stocks were about to finish.

The emails indicate a level of familiarity between Farrugia and Mizzi.

Two invitations are made to Mizzi to attend a party organised by Total, the parent company for Totsa, in Paris.

The invitation to the Paris Total 2007 party sent to Leli Mizzi and George Farrugia

And the familiarity is manifest in the way Mizzi addressed George affectionately, with the appellation ‘Hawn Ginger…’.

But a more intriguing email involves the specifications for the blending of a fuel consignment, the specifications being shared by Farrugia with Trafigura officials.

Various emails, dated years apart, suggest a trail of communication on the details of what the calculated blends of the procured oils should read, according to specifications advised by Saybolt Laboratories, a monitoring laboratory that was commissioned by Enemalta.

The email informing George Farrugia about the specifications advice given by Saybolt, a laboratory technically working for Enemalta

In the email, also copied to Mizzi, Trafigura tells George Farrugia to “please note that Saybolt will test the HFT once discharge is completed and product has settled. Kindly inform same to Enemalta.”

The communication indicates the degree of familiarity between civil servants whose job was to ensure that fuel procurements had the right specifications, and oil traders that were being informed from the inside, on fuel stock levels.

The intimate emails between George Farrugia and Leli Mizzi, referring to the 2006 Paris Total party

The intimate emails between George Farrugia and Leli Mizzi, referring to the 2006 Paris Total party

An arraignment of civil servants who, like former MRA director and energy ministry consultant Godwin Sant, were clearly serving George Farrugia’s business interests in the lubricants industry, is bound to be detrimental to the oil trader’s presidential pardon.

Originally the pardon was granted to him on the advice of Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi on condition that he tells all that he knew about corruption in the supply of oil to Enemalta.

But now Farrugia has been faced with the new email revelations, showing that he withheld vital information from both police investigators as well as MPs in the public accounts committee.

It is especially unclear how the initial police investigation depended solely on confrontations between George Farrugia and Frank Sammut, a former chief executive of the Enemalta subsidiary MOBC (Mediterranean Oil Bunkering Corporation), who had accepted a kickback from Trafigura into a Gibraltar-based account registered in his name.

Sammut, later a consultant under Enemalta chairman Tancred Tabone, was said to have brokered a series of kickbacks through George Farrugia; and after leaving Enemalta, set up Island Bunker Oils with him and Tabone as silent partners, and Francis Portelli and Anthony Cassar as shareholders. All four men face charges of bribery following Farrugia’s statements to the police.

Instead, Farrugia’s testimony against his five brothers – the shareholders of the John’s Group whose subsidiary Powerplan was managed by George Farrugia – has led to their planned arraignment on 25 February.

It was already established that the Malta Security Service was aware that while Farrugia was managing family business Powerplan, he was also skimming off profits on oil sales from Trafigura and Totsa through his own secret company, Aikon Ltd.

Emails have shown that his wife Cathy Farrugia was also responsible in issuing invoices for commissions on oil sales to Enemalta, which were being paid to Aikon. The company itself was set up through fiduciary company Intershore, to hide its beneficial ownership; but Intershore’s directors relinquished their services to Farrugia when his brothers found out that the oil trader was skimming profits from Powerplan sales.

In August 2012, seven months before MaltaToday broke the story of the Trafigura kickback to Frank Sammut, copies of Aikon Ltd invoices were presented to Lawrence Gonzi by his Security Service detail.

Gonzi instructed the MSS officer, a police constable, to pass them onto his superior, at that time Godfrey Scicluna, head of the MSS.

The papers were part of a vital cache of invoices that Farrugia’s brothers had deposited in court when they initiated action against George Farrugia, claiming that their brother had stolen €7 million in profits that should have been Powerplan’s. They eventually settled for a payback of €1 million from Farrugia.

When these invoices were passed on to Godfrey Scicluna, the MSS head approached a member of Investments Minister Austin Gatt’s secretariat. According to court testimony and a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee, some of the notes in this voluminous file were shredded and the rest of the file passed on to the Tax Compliance Unit.

The latest hearings in the PAC have served to reveal inconsistencies in many of the declarations made by several individuals called to testify.

Notable examples were the testimonies by Lawrence Gonzi. Gonzi, it has been proven, knew George Farrugia’s wife Cathy at the time she worked as a secretary on the same floor at the Mizzi Organisation where Gonzi worked; and had also met George Farrugia on at least two occasions.

What is unclear is why the police did not arraign the Farrugia brothers from the John’s Group back in 2013, when they were already faced with the accusations made by the pardoned George Farrugia.

A clue into this kind of gingerly approach by police investigators was the proximity of John’s Group members to the Nationalist administration, perhaps exemplified by the limousine cars provided for free to several ministers during the 2008 electoral campaign. At least one minister is known to have had his own private car garaged at the John’s Garage for five years; and another two ministers had two BMW vehicles granted for their use before and after the 2008 election. It’s the past of some Nationalist ministers, some of them still MPs, that could return to haunt them as the accused start giving evidence in court.