Former Fimbank banker claims police, security services illegally surveilled him

A former top official at a Maltese corporate bank has accused the police and security services of hacking his and other people’s phones to illegally snoop on meetings and private conversations, after transcripts of his intercepted phone calls were exhibited as part of court proceedings in Sicily.

The claim appears in a judicial protest recently filed by Carmelo Occhipinti, an Italian banking and financial consultant and a resident of Malta for the past 21 years, against the Commissioner of Police, the Head of the Malta Security Services and the State Advocate.

Occhipinti had occupied the roles of Senior and Executive Vice President at Fimbank, a Malta-based banking institution, for 17 years. He stepped down in 2003.

In the judicial protest, which was signed by lawyers Jason Azzopardi and Kris Busietta, Occhipinti states that it is an “unequivocal and irrefutable fact” that the Malta Security Services (MSS) had intercepted a number of phone calls between his Maltese mobile phone number and third parties, in a six-month period spanning from March to August 2019.

Occhipinti is understood to have been a person of interest in money-laundering investigations.

“Not only this, but from around the end of January 2019 to early October 2019, so for a period of 8 months, the same Maltese security services and/or their Italian counterparts, had been listening in to conversations which the protestant was having with third parties, amongst whom were clients of the financial institution which he used to work for, through mobile phones belonging to other Italian persons while they were in his vicinity.”

From a privacy perspective, Occhipinti states that the defendants had been listening in to every conversation he had with his clients, even when he was meeting them in person at the bank, through the clients’  phones, whenever the devices were switched on and not in airplane mode.

As proof of this, Occhipinti pointed to transcripts of these conversations which were formally exhibited by the public prosecutor of Catania’s District Antimafia Directorate, the information having been harvested by MSS.

Occhipinti claims that this data had been gathered without a warrant issued by the minister, as required by the Security Services Act.

The transcripts exhibited in the Catania court indicated that meetings with third parties at the Fimbank offices in St. Julian's had been recorded in this manner, during Occhipinti’s tenure as VP.

Besides being illegal, the Italian’s lawyers say the intelligence gathering methods employed breached his fundamental right to the respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence, as enshrined in the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The judicial protest reserves Occhipinti’s right to begin further court proceedings to determine the consequences of the legal and human rights breaches.