Police search house of Simon Busuttil’s sister over allegations of Delia’s falsified signature

Police have carried out a search at the house of Diana Busuttil – the sister of former PN leader Simon Busuttil – in connection with the allegations of falsified signatures made by Opposition leader Adrian Delia.

Diana Busuttil was formerly married to Kris Bajada, the son of Eucharist Bajada, the owner of the offshore companies which owned London houses involved in a prostitution racket. Delia’s relationship with Bajada and his offshore network of companies is the subject of an FIAU investigation which was forwarded to the police in March 2018.

READ MORE: Delia and Cardona resigned directorship of company owning Soho brothel after police raid

Last Saturday, Delia claimed that documents he had seen in connection with the FIAU report carried signatures that had been falsified, and filed a complaint with the Commissioner of Police.

Duty magistrate Aaron Bugeja was tasked with the investigation, which resulted in search warrants issued and a search taking place in the early hours of Sunday morning at the house of Diana Busuttil.

Delia is said to have held a Jersey bank account which received £349,000 – close to half a million euro – in the form of cheque and cash deposits, ostensibly on behalf of his client Eucharist Bajada. Documents previously unearthed by MaltaToday show that Delia was a director of Bahamas firm Healey Properties, a company which owned 52, Greek Street in London – a property raided in July 2003 by London police during Operation Pabail, an investigation into a prostitution racket.

Delia was revealed to have been copied into legal letters in a dispute between London lawyers representing Eucharist Bajada on the one hand, and his brother Emmanuel, aka Lolly.

The letters suggest that Emmanuel and his wife Eve were supposed to collect the rents from a host of London properties, and pass them on to Healey Properties or AAS Freight Services. At one point, all rent accumulated from 1999 to 2003 – some £20,000 a month – was not passed on to the companies, leading to the dispute. The money, the lawyers write in the letters, was supposed to have been paid into Adrian Delia’s Barclays International account in Jersey.

A company resolution from December 2003 published by MaltaToday introduced a new element to the story, first broken by Daphne Caruana Galizia: both Delia and now Labour minister Chris Cardona had their names on a resignation resolution, five months after the Operation Pabail raid. Only Delia’s alleged signature appears on this resolution.

The two men were replaced as directors by two companies, one of which appears to be registered in the UK, and the second in the British Virgin Islands.