Casa hands new evidence to ECB on 'money laundering organisation' Pilatus Bank

The European Central Bank has been given further evidence on Pilatus Bank which goes beyond “merely flouting Anti-Money Laundering codes”, Nationalist MEP David Casa has said.

Casa said that he was given additional evidence on the bank implicated in the Egrant inquiry and other money laundering allegations, which he was asked to pass on to the ECB. “The bank appears to have been conceived from the very start as an organisation designed to launder money, with banking staff instructed to fabricate paper trails justifying suspicious transactions after they have been carried out,” he said.

Referring to the report published by the European Parliament delegation on rule of law in Malta, which called on the ECB to assess how Pilatus Bank continued to hold a license to operate in the EU, Casa said that his call for ECB intervention in the case of Pilatus Bank is now “a position shared by representatives of all political groups in the European Parliament.”

Casa had called for the withdrawal of the bank’s licence through a complaint filed on 25 November last year. He also asked for the bank to be taken over by the ECB.

Pilatus Bank was drawn into the investigation of allegations that the Prime Minister's wife Michelle Muscat was the owner of a secret Panama company, Egrant, and that the bank had  processed a $1 million transaction into her account from Azerbaijan.

Casa has said that Daniele Nouy, chair of the ECB Supervisory Board, had informed him that the reports he gave her – leaked documents compiled by the Financial Investigation and Analysis Unit about the bank – had been distributed among its members for assessment. “I expect the ECB to protect the integrity of the European Banking System and to take action to prevent dirty Azeri money from accessing the EU’s financial system,” he told MaltaToday.