Portelli asked Yorgen Fenech to help him leak stories to Labour about Delia foes

The former editor of The Malta Independent and Adrian Delia’s former chief canvasser, Pierre Portelli, has admitted using Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech to leak stories to the Labour Party on Delia’s internal party critics and rebels.

Portelli had led the paper when it was part of the ICIJ’s Panama Papers exposé, which the assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia had propped up with her revelations on Keith Schembri, the former right-hand man to former prime minister Joseph Muscat.

Appearing in the public inquiry on the assassination of Caruana Galizia, Pierre Portelli on Wednesday appeared to represent the two sides of a media business that attempts to scrutinise those in power, but remains in thrall of their financial power.

“I believe politics, business and the media are too close in Malta,” he said at one point. But then he revealed that he had contacted Yorgen Fenech in March 2019 to collect a donation to the PN, when he served as media chief after the election of Adrian Delia in 2017.

“Me being desperate to pay employees' salaries I had contacted Yorgen Fenech to pay it up. I would not use it to directly pay salaries however. The company Media.Link would issue the salaries.”

Despite having the led the paper at the height of its Panama Papers exposé, Portelli claimed he was aware the anti-corruption narrative had failed to stick even with PN voters; and that despite the reports on Fenech’s Electrogas, he still entertained a Tumas acquisition bid for Standard Publications, the Independent’s publishers.

The relationship later enabled him to use Fenech as a conduit to Labour after he left the press and started working for Delia inside the PN.

He produced three case files containing what he said were 130 stories leaked by Delia’s adversaries to the press. “I was desperate. I decided to fight fire with fire. As desperate as I was. I turned onto Yorgen Fenech and told him that there was a coup against the leader [Delia], ‘do you have contacts at the Labour Party?’”

Portelli confirmed that Fenech had shown interest in buying out Standard Publications, the publishers of the Malta Independent, at the time he was its editor-in-chief. Fenech had said DB Group boss Silvio Debono could show interest in the acquisition as well.

“I had told Yorgen Fenech that if he wanted to buy the paper without Daphne Caruana Galizia he would be wasting his money as her magazine Taste and Flair was a major earner for it.”

He said Fenech reacted by saying, “As if!” (Ma tarax).

Egrant claims

Portelli had interviewed Maria Efimova, a former Pilatus employee charged with misappropriation of some bank cash funds, had a document showing Muscat’s wife to be the owner of Egrant. The claim was never backed up in a subsequent magisterial inquiry. At the time the Malta Independent had advanced major claims on Egrant, the secret Panama offshore company opened by Nexia BT at the same time as Keith Schembri’s and Konrad Mizzi’s companies.

Portelli said he had asked Efimova for the UBO documents on Egrant but she had refused since investigating magistrate Aaron Bugeja had ordered her not to publish the documents. “She said that she had gone to the Russian embassy and had been warned that if she breached the magistrate’s orders, she wouldn’t be given a passport.”

He then claimed he felt his Xtra appearance in May 2017, where he claimed to have a scoop about having seen the Egrant documents, now felt like an ambush. It was Portelli who indeed had stated on TVM’s Xtra in the run-up to the 2017 snap election that he had seen the never-published declarations of trust that the late journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia claimed had shown Michelle Muscat, wife of prime minister Joseph Muscat, to be the owner of the Panamanian company Egrant.

Portelli had given Magistrate Aaron Bugeja copies of what were falsified ‘declarations of trust’ of the Egrant Inc. offshore company.

On 1st June, two days before the general election, Portelli confirmed on Xtra he had seen the documents with his own eyes. “I am the only one amongst you who has also seen the documents that the whistleblower had showed the magistrate,” Portelli told the other journalists on the panel. “Take it as a scoop if you want, but I couldn’t publish these documents because the Russian embassy had warned the whistleblower that it wouldn’t help her if she ignores the magistrate’s advice.”

Pierre Portelli has defended his role in the Egrant saga, arguing that he never gave credence to a crucial document that fell into his possession. “I never published this document or even said in public that I believed it to true. When I received this document, I did what any responsible person in the world would have done and handed it over to the inquiring magistrate. I actually handed in this document after the general election, so Labour’s spin about this being a political move makes no sense at all.”