Daphne Project: Journalist had received leaked files from Electrogas

Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s advisor was a member of the selection board that chose the Electrogas consortium for the gas power project, the latest revelations from The Daphne Project show.

Brian Tonna of Nexia BT was one of 25 members on the selection board that chose Electrogas as the preferred bidder.

Nexia BT was the financial services firm that helped set up Panama companies for Mizzi and Schembri. The process had started shortly after the 2013 election but the pair insist they only took possession of the companies in 2015.

The Panama companies had as their "target client" a Dubai-based company 17 Black, which is reported to have received a payment from the Malta agent of the gas storage tanker that forms part of the gas power project.

The new information came from a freedom of information request filed by the Times of Malta, a partner in The Daphne Project, a consortium of international journalists.

The selection committee also included former Labour Party candidate and Identity Malta chief Joe Vella Bonnici and a handful of individuals closely linked to Mizzi. Enemalta told the Times of Malta that all members of the selection committee were chosen on the basis of their expertise.

In the latest instalment, The Daphne Project revealed that Daphne Caruana Galizia had received a cache of 680,000 leaked files from Electrogas months before her assassination on 16 October last year.

Leak lifts lid on price of gas

The files, which were shared with The Daphne Project, shed new light on the secretive energy contracts signed by the government.

When the Electrogas contract was published in Parliament it had been heavily redacted.

The contract details now show that Electrogas entered into a $1 billion deal with Azerbaijan’s state-owned company Socar, through which Malta will import all its gas needs from the company for 10 years.

The price at which Enemalta and Electrogas buy gas from Socar is fixed at €9.40 per unit for five years, until April 2022, the leaked contracts show. The multiple energy contracts, signed in April 2015, bind Enemalta to buy €131.6 million worth of LNG from Electrogas yearly.

An energy expert quoted by British newspaper The Guardian, a partner of The Daphne Project, questioned the judiciousness of the contract.

Simon Pirani, a senior visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said that since the deals were inked, oil and gas prices have crashed, with the expert saying that Malta paid “nearly twice the market rate” for its gas needs in 2017.

This came at a potential profit of $40 million (€32.7 million) for Socar, who declined to comment on the contract details, citing confidentiality.

After the five-year fixed price period, Enemalta will pay an index-linked price set at 14 per cent of Brent oil.

Read also: Government defends energy deal: Gas hedging provided price stability, lower tariffs