Martin Young of the OCCRP ( Organised Crime & Corruption Reporting Project) reports
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s work uncovering corruption in Malta delved into visa-for-sale schemes, energy deals, and Caribbean offshore companies set up for Maltese politicians. Now, an investigation has found that all these stories come together — in China.
Key Findings
- Macbridge, a mysterious company named as part of a kickback scheme investigated by Daphne Caruana Galizia, is linked to a Chinese consultant who negotiated a major energy deal in Malta.
- Macbridge was set up by the mother-in-law of the consultant, Chen Cheng, a senior executive at the Chinese branch of the multinational consulting firm Accenture.
- Both Chen and his mother-in-law are also connected to companies and businessmen that facilitate the sale of Maltese residency visas in China.
- Chen asked another relative to set up a company that received a one-million-euro payment from 17 Black, a firm famously owned by Maltese tycoon Yorgen Fenech, who has been charged with the murder of Caruana Galizia.
For a tiny country, the Mediterranean island nation of Malta has spawned a huge number of corruption scandals — and Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia covered most of them on her crusading blog, Running Commentary.
She was one of the first to report on 17 Black, a mysterious Dubai company that she believed was linked to senior Maltese officials. She also dug into dubious circumstances surrounding a 2014 agreement to sell a major stake in Malta’s only electricity company to a Chinese state-owned firm, and a suspicious subsequent investment in a Montenegro wind farm. And in 2016, she seized on a Chinese media report claiming that Malta would be selling residency visas to wealthy Chinese citizens — with no questions asked about the source of applicants’ funds.
But Caruana Galizia didn’t live to see the end of these stories, even as her work caused them to emerge as hot-button political issues in Malta, leading to multiple corruption cases and even criminal charges against members of the country’s political elite.
In October 2017, just a few hours after publishing a final blog post — “There are crooks everywhere you look now,” it warned — Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb. Her assassination triggered a scandal that exposed corruption at the heart of Malta’s government, toppled its prime minister, and sent shock waves throughout the European Union.
Read the full article here https://www.occrp.org/en/thedaphneproject/trail-of-murdered-journalists-reporting-leads-from-malta-to-china
