A Harrods spending spree… and so many unanswered questions

Last week, I suggested a few things the PN should do if it wants to get elected. 

Perhaps, I should have added that it needs to vet its candidates properly and make sure that everyone representing the Nationalist Party is above reproach and will not tarnish its chances of being a possible alternative. Of course, this applies even more so to the Labour Party, which has had an abysmal track record in this respect, with more than its share of elected officials who have repeatedly brought shame to the present administration while robbing the country.

But when you are a party in Opposition, you cannot afford to have anyone on your team who dig you deeper into an already existing hole from which you cannot seem to be able to climb out of.

Obviously, no one could have predicted that Francine Farrugia, a relatively mild-looking young woman, aged 31, would be the type of person who could embezzle (allegedly) the shocking sum of €2.3 million from her employer, MCAST.

For all outward appearances, as a PN councillor on the Siġġiewi local council, she was diligently pointing out shortcomings by the current administration. In July of this year, she wrote an indignant (justified) post because in this day and age, no money was being spent by the government in state schools to provide air conditioners. “We have money for other things, why don’t we give priority to such a basic thing as the health and wellbeing of our children?”

In December of 2024 she was even promoting the Ġemma money management courses at her local council in Siġġiewi—the irony of which now hits you smack in the face.

Apart from describing herself as a digital creator, Ms Farrugia was a finance manager and lecturer at MCAST and also ran a gift shop in her home town, which served as a sub post office for MaltaPost.

Behind all these many hats and facade of respectability, however, there seems to have been another type of woman altogether. As the person responsible for the payroll at the college, she quietly and successfully (allegedly) siphoned off enough money to buy a property, cars and go on a €113,000 spending spree of luxury goods at Harrods in London.

During a two-year period between September 2023 and May 2025, the police discovered that she had transferred €422,420 into her bank accounts and another €1.9 million into her Revolut account. In fact, this is a salient point, because it appears that it was not MCAST itself which uncovered the misappropriation of funds, but a police investigation.

It was the police who contacted MCAST in July to inform them of the investigation and that they had stopped a €122,000 transfer into Farrugia’s account.

We have so many questions…

The most obvious question on everyone’s lips is: Why didn’t MCAST catch that Farrugia was (allegedly) issuing double salaries to herself, or one salary for an employee and another for herself?

A spokesperson for the college confirmed that “annual audits have been carried out consistently, including over the past two years” and that an external audit is currently underway. Yet we have also learned from another report, that an audit by the National Audit Office in 2019 turned up “various inaccuracies” after a random test of allowances and payments by MCAST to its employees.

“Although if taken individually, amounts were not always material, the incidence of inaccuracies is of concern,” the Auditor General wrote.

MCAST confirmed during the audit that the payroll’s inbuilt validation system “does not function”.

“As a result, if an obvious error is recorded, for instance, 100 hours of overtime are inputted by a lecturer for a particular day, this is not being automatically flagged by the system,” the Auditor General said.

Words fail me. How can an institution like MCAST function without a robust payroll system, and more significantly, was there someone else in on this elaborate scam, who has yet to be found out?

The second question is, what will happen to all that money that was (allegedly) stolen?  Will Francine Farrugia (who is now remanded under arrest without bail) be made to pay back every cent and will her assets be seized until she does so?  When people defraud “the government” it is not some faceless grey building, nor is it Robert Abela & co. personally who have been robbed.  It is being taken from us; every single one of us who pay taxes and VAT, and who obey the law to the letter.

Finally, the last question is what is perhaps baffling everyone the most. So, MCAST didn’t notice; no one who around her noticed that she was living such a disproportionately lavish life on her salary, and perhaps most incredibly, the banks and Revolut did not flag it either—or at least not until July when the police investigation started).

No wonder most of us have the impression that banks pick on the “little people” and come down on them like a tonne of bricks for innocuous transactions, and yet when millions are involved, it takes two years for it to be discovered.

Francine Farrugia managed to (allegedly) misappropriate the funds for so long because once she got away with it the first time, and realised that no one had noticed, she probably believed she would never get caught. I don’t know whether she ever wore any of her luxury items, one of which was a necklace worth €5,000, but the fact that she bought property and had even entered into promises of sale for other properties makes one wonder whatever happened to all the due diligence one normally encounters when you are asked about your source of funds.

The amount transferred to Revolut is especially mind-boggling because we all use it and I for one always assumed that they are strict about dubiously large transactions. When I looked up the section about source of funds, their website says: “If we need additional information about your wealth or income, you'll receive an email, a push notification, and see a banner on your in-app 'Home' screen. We'll also let you know if there’s a due date for submitting these details. Providing this information will ensure your account remains functional and helps combat financial crime. While you aren’t obliged to provide these documents, we’ll restrict or close your account as per our T&Cs if we do not receive them.”

Again, the question is, if this is how the police investigation was triggered, why did it take so long?

The sardonic quips doing the rounds about Harrods are understandable, because humour is a great coping mechanism at a time when this country keeps descending further and further into the pits, but in reality, this latest scandal is enough to fill you with hopeless despair.

It is yet another example of a complete lack of a moral compass among some elected officials which inevitably filters down to the hoi polloi—for the reasoning is inevitably going to be, if they are doing it, why shouldn’t I?