Muscat: ‘Indian witness claims I pocketed €16 million a year, but no proof exists’

Former prime minister Joseph Muscat, who is facing criminal charges alleging money laundering in the privatisation scandal of three state hospitals, has revealed that an Indian national is the whistleblower upon whom allegations against him have been based.

Muscat was hosted on Labour Party radio station One by loyalist Manuel Cuschieri, and said that the Indian national had told the magistrate that “he had heard someone else, say something about me”.

Muscat claimed these declarations, which he has seen in the parts of the magisterial inquiry shown to him, “have not been backed up, and that there is no documentation presented on such allegations. Manuel... there isn’t one shred of paper.”

An inquiry, criminal charges and what’s next for Muscat & Co.

The former Labour leader said he has seen two documents concerning him, and not the entire inquiry report, penned by an Irish team of experts and a Serbian court expert, which he claims carry no rationale on how the accusations were arrived at, or how the alleged scale of fraud was quantified.

He has since had all his assets frozen, with a cautionary value of €30 million.

Muscat did not mention the name of the Indian national, but did not say whether he knew who he was. The allegation – Muscat said – is that he was pocketing €16 million a year which he had stashed in a Dubai company. “The inquiry states that there is no evidence of this cash, and yet they are still charging me... the allegation and reasoning is simply the kind of logic you hear in a bar on Sunday morning.”

“I am looking forward to this. I am convinced that once this Calvary is over, anyone who is associated with the charges will be the cause of the Nationalist Party’s destruction,” Muscat said. “It’s the last nail in the party’s coffin.”

Muscat said that now that he has learnt of the allegations within the magisterial inquiry, requested by his lawyers through a Constitutional claim, he was certain that he was the target of a ruse he dubbed “worse than Egrant” – the allegation that his wife owned a secret offshore company in Panama.

“I can tell you now that this is a second Egrant,” he told Manuel Cuschieri.

“I’ll say that the magistrate has done her job… she’s out of the equation.

“But once my critics get the satisfaction of seeing me hauled into court, I can tell you that upon learning what sort of evidence has been presented, this can only lead to the destruction of the Nationalist Party.”

Muscat also accused detractors of having backed allegations which were simply aimed at targeting the Labour Party and the government, and loyal civil servants who had served the Maltese state. “The people accused in this inquiry were loyal servants of the State. I am sorry for them, for Chris Fearne and Edward Scicluna, who have found themselves facing this ordeal: it’s just a castle made out of sand, and I will be the wave that comes crashing over it.”

Muscat said he had no doubt that he would win acquittal over the charge, but that he would also wage a political fight against Labour’s detractors. “I want them to shoulder responsibility for this injustice. I want to help people who suffer injustice at certain structures of power... I will be like a tsunami that will sweep away these people who are trying to humiliate me. It will spell the end of the Nationalist Party, who will have to blame its own extremists, who have advanced allegations without a shred of evidence.”