Repubblika lawyer: Pilatus inquiry cost €3.5 million more in foreign legal fees

Government entities disbursed an additional €3.5 million from the public purse to overseas law firms for their assistance in the investigation into Pilatus bank, which had eventually led to a magisterial inquiry into the bank’s operations, according to a document signed by Repubblika’s lawyer Jason Azzopardi.

The sum of €3.5 million was paid from the public coffers by the MFSA and the FIAU to foreign firms, amongst them Squire Patton Briggs, a foreign law firm.

If confirmed, this would mean that the real cost of the inquiry was €11.1 million, far more that the €7.6 million figure given to parliament last April by the justice minister at the time, Edward Zammit Lewis.

The document was filed in the acts of Repubblika’s case against the Attorney General over the Attorney General’s apparent reluctance to charge several high-ranking Pilatus Bank officials, which is scheduled to continue next week.

In a judicial letter filed in July, Azzopardi had stated that Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg’s consistent refusal to press charges against individuals singled out for prosecution by the magisterial inquiry into the bank’s operations, was unreasonable and showed bad faith on the part of the public prosecutor. 

The document filed today reads: “Under oath I confirm that I have just received confirmation that besides the sum of €7.6 million which was the cost of the magisterial inquiry into Pilatus Bank which ended in March 2021, the sum of €3.5 million were paid from the public coffers by public entities such as the MFSA and the FIAU to foreign firms (amongst them Squire Patton Briggs, a foreign law firm) for work and investigations into Pilatus bank and which work and reports gave rise to the opening of the magisterial inquiry into the operations of Pilatus Bank.”

That investigation had started “precisely due to the MFSA and FIAU’s strong suspicions that, amongst other things, Pilatus Bank was a money laundering machine,” the lawyer goes on to state.