Money laundering charge in police traffic abuse case included to ramp up official statistics, Jason Azzopardi claims

There is a “political” motive behind the police’s decision to include money laundering charges in the abuse case involving traffic branch officers, Jason Azzopardi has claimed.

In a scathing Facebook post on Wednesday, the Nationalist MP said Assistant Police Commissioner Ian Abdilla, responsible from the economic crimes division, wanted to include the charge to ramp up the number of money laundering cases prosecuted by the police in official statistics.

Azzopardi said this was being done “to impress” Moneyval ahead of an assessment expected later this year, which risks grey-listing Malta for failure to clamp down on money laundering in a meaningful way.

Abdilla is the lead investigator in the police traffic branch scandal that erupted at the start of the year when a whistleblower lifted the lid on widespread abuse of overtime and extra payments made to officers in the section.

Investigations are ongoing and nobody has been charged yet, although some officers, including senior officials from the traffic branch, have resigned. Other charges against the officers are expected to include fraud and misappropriation.

Without entering into the merits of whether the money laundering charge in the traffic police case was appropriate, Azzopardi said Abdilla’s decision was politically motivated.

The MP then put a series of questions: “I have the right to ask him [Abdilla] whether it is correct to include the money laundering charge based solely on political considerations and not legal ones? Why did you not investigate and charged in court on attempted money laundering of millions by Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Brian Tonna, Karl Cini, Chris Cardona, Ali Sadr, Ram Tumuluri, Shaukat Ali, Yorgen Fenech and Joseph Muscat?”

Moneyval and other international institutions have been critical of Malta for the lack of prosecutions on suspicions of money laundering flagged by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit.

It is the police’s role to investigate and prosecute cases referred to it by the FIAU.