Drugs and Politics

Background to saga:

Richard Cachia Caruana: Head of KPMG Malta, Prime Minister’s personal assistant and now Malta's permanent representative to the EU.

Presidential Pardon to notorious thug and party foot soldier Zeppi l-Hafi.

Clarissa Cachia, wife of Kurt Cachia who with brother Steve Cachia are directors and run Deloitte and Touche Malta, more recently involved in laundering money for the Parmalat. Clarissa was found not guilty despite being arrested with one kilo of pure uncut cocaine.


Meinrad Calleja’s trial by jury

Zambi testimony is serendipity for Meinrad Calleja defence

Matthew Vella
Assessing the credibility of witnesses in Meinrad Calleja’s trial by jury has been the focus of both prosecution and defence in a week where a crucial testimony by convicted Carmel Attard ‘iz-Zambi,’ may have landed the Calleja defence team, led by Dr Emanuel Mallia, a bonus card.
Meinrad Calleja, 41, is pleading not guilty to having commissioned the attempted murder of the Prime Minister’s personal assistant Richard Cachia Caruana, stabbed outside his home in Mdina on 18 December 1994. Carmel Attard was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment in 1998 after pleading guilty to stabbing Cachia Caruana by Mr Justice Vincent Degaetano, who is presiding Calleja’s trial by jury.

Attard’s testimony has revealed accounts of coercion, fear, and new insights into the person of Zeppi l-Hafi, the notorious moniker of Joseph Fenech, grantee of the Prime Minister’s presidential pardon in return for disclosing the perpetrators of the attack on Richard Cachia Caruana.

Breaking a nine-year silence, Attard testified in Court this week that former co-accused Ian Farrugia, acquitted of stabbing Cachia Caruana, had told him it was Zeppi l-Hafi who had carried out the crime.

Describing him as a compulsive liar ("ma’ kull nifs jigdeb"), Attard said Fenech would spit at the Prime Minister’s Volvo whenever he passed by it outside the PM’s residence in Birkirkara, recalling Fenech saying he would continue doing so until Fenech Adami died. Attard said he was fooled ("laghabni kemm felah") and threatened by Fenech into accepting blame for the attempted murder.

Attard’s testimony at the hands of the prosecution’s interrogatory was serendipitous for defence counsel Emanuel Mallia, who did not counter-examine Attard.

Earlier on, Joseph Fenech recounted criminal endeavours in connection with Calleja, namely a 1992 burglary in Sliema and a botch drug exchange with Calleja’s sister Clarissa Cachia – both cases were foiled by the police. He recalled Calleja pestering him for two months to carry out the crime, and how he attempted to procrastinate matters since he did not want to kill Cachia Caruana, whom he knew.

In the end, Fenech recalled, he got a drunkard – Carmel Attard ‘iz-Zambi’ – to do a job he hoped would never be carried through, and he takes credit for that, since Calleja would have brought in an Italian killer to do the job.

In his counter-examination, Mallia has attempted to offer new directions into the complexity of the court process by attempting to discredit the prosecution’s case that Meinrad Calleja commissioned the murder in retribution for the resignation of his father, Brigadier Maurice Calleja.

Mallia’s counter-examination of Zeppi l-Hafi included questions on his relations with acquaintance Carmel Borg ‘is-Sunnara,’ the PM’s chauffeur, and Salvu Ellul of Elbros Construction, all three former minders who camped out on Fenech Adami’s doorstep during the violent eighties, protecting the then-Opposition leader from further attacks on his home.
A crucial point was perhaps when Mallia asked Fenech whether he was an acquaintance of building contractors, to which Fenech answered he knew some personally. It was a fleeting question, but why would building contractors feature in connection with the attempt on Cachia Carauna’s life?

Searching for ulterior motives besides retribution for Meinrad Calleja’s father’s resignation, allegedly driven by Richard Cachia Caruana himself, is leading the defence to offer new directions in which to explore the reasons for the attempted murder of the PM’s aide.
Not only is this meant to exonerate Calleja as mandate of the crime, but also to try and expose any form of falsehood on the part of Zeppi l-Hafi as past evidence is turned inside-out. In the case of the defence, Fenech was asked why he told Carmel Borg that he knew all about the attempt on Cachia Caruana’s life but only decided to speak to the Prime Minister months later. He was also asked why he had decided to go to the Prime Minister to reveal all that had happened in full knowledge that saying he had acted as middleman would have exposed him to prosecution. Why did he not go to the Police Commissioner in the first place?

And that is where Fenech’s presidential pardon is put into play. Was he aware of the pardon when he met Fenech Adami for the third time in a series of meetings in which the PM urged Fenech he reveal all and testify to the Court on what he knew? Fenech said it could have been mentioned during this particular meeting, although in other statements he said he had heard about the pardon on the evening news on his car radio, following police interrogation.

Would he have got the pardon for the pending drug charges had he not mentioned Meinrad Calleja as his mandate, Mallia asked? And Mallia stressed, it was convenient for Fenech to mention Calleja. If Fenech mentioned a building contractor instead, he might not have been granted the pardon on his pending drug charges, Calleja’s defence lawyer suggested. Mallia argued that if Fenech had identified somebody else other than Meinrad, Fenech might have received a pardon for the attempt on Cachia Caruana, but not on the drug charges which had also implicated Meinrad and his sister, Clarissa Cachia.

The Zambi testimony compounds two past statements: that of crime scene witness Nicholas Jensen, who said he recognised Zeppi l-Hafi as the perpetrator at Mdina during the trial by jury of co-accused Ian Farrugia, albeit never having recognised Fenech in previous identification line-ups; and Farrugia’s own statements that Attard had been half asleep in the car during the attack.

The contradiction in Zambi’s statements have already been exploited by the prosecution, with deputy Attorney General Silvio Camilleri stating that in 1996 Attard had added details to incriminate Joseph Fenech rather than shouldering the blame himself, as he was now claiming. Attard’s claims run counter to his original statements to the police back in 1996, a clear reversal of the events as he recalled them when he pleaded guilty of carrying out the attack on Cachia Caruana. Highlighting the contradiction, much can be said about Attard’s discrepant mess, and how credible he can prove himself to be in the face of these new statements.

The trial by jury is expected to continue tomorrow at 9am.

Irrefutable proof: Malta a European drug trade centre

Irrefutable proof: Malta a European drug trade centre

By David Lindsay

While the Maltese security service were busy listening to private conversations of John Citizen and Security Service Chief George Grech was facing serious allegations of sexual abuse by a former acquaintance, German and Italian vice squads were tracking Hamburg’s biggest ever drug find down to Malta.

Revelations in the German media lend evidence to the fact that Malta is serving as a redistribution centre for drugs from South America. It also proves that Malta police have been missing the wood for the trees.

While the Malta police have been blowing their bugles over catching youths with cannabis or a few ecstasy pills and believing that Malta’s drug barons are behind bars at Kordin, cocaine worth 46 million marks destined for the Italian market was being discovered in a container destined for the Malta Freeport.

The find included 514 kilogrammes of 90% pure cocaine and 25,000 ecstasy pills – representing a local market value of over Lm 20 million.

The plan, according to German investigators, was to use speedboats from Malta to ship the drugs to the Italian mainland. Such speedboats would have most likely been manned by Maltese individuals, considering the experience some Maltese have been shown to have in crossing the Sicilian straits under cover of night and at high speeds.

The federal criminal investigators in Germany were somehow tipped off that cocaine from Venezuela was being transhipped to Malta via Hamburg. There were 2,500 containers on the container ship Nedlloyd Kingston, which left the Venezuelan port of La Guaira on 17 December and arrived in Hamburg on 10 January. It later arrived in Malta on the 27 January.

The search carried out by the German and Italian police discovered 64 packages of the drug buried beneath 1,152 packs of work gloves at the rear of the container. The packages were hidden behind carbon paper, a practice that aims to render x-ray machines useless.

In a sting operation, investigators had removed the drugs and allowed the container to depart for Malta in order to apprehend those related to the case. It appears that this was done without informing the Maltese authorities. If this is the case, it confirms a degree of mistrust in the Maltese police and security services.

Later in September, up to 13 individuals were arrested in Naples in connection to the shipment. The operation is still being kept under wraps and it is not known whether the Maltese authorities will be approaching their Italian and German counterparts for further information.

First company to operate from Smart City packs its bags before Smart City opens

Below follows an article about Atlas Technology Group quitting Malta. The article does not cover the full story - since the truth would be to0 difficult to print. However, an ex-employee of this company gave us the inside story.

AtlasTG chief, Minister Austin Gatt and Claudio Grech (Smart City CEO) at the launch on AtlasTG in Malta

Atlas Technology Group ultimately left Malta because they were fed up with being expected to pay huge sums of money to Icon, the company run by Gege Gatt, the son of the not so honorable Austin Gatt - head of the IT Ministry. They where also exasperated by the poor infratructure, internet outages, erratic power supply and to add insult to injury - the very high costs of these services. Difficulties in recruiting qualified people, and the expectation to employ political party stooges also did not help.

The CEO of Smart City is now Claudio Grech. Claudio qualification for the job is having been IT miniter's side kick for many years and its widely rumoured that Claudio and Austin may be on very intimate terms.

Articles follows:


The company that promised 600 jobs in the ICT industry and professed to be 'the first ICT corporation to publicly declare intention to be tenants in Smart City' packed its bags and relocated to the US a few days ago, before Smart City has even started hosting its first tenants.

Two years ago, Atlas Technology Group said during a press conference – addressed also by a boastful IT Minister Austin Gatt – that the company will be employing 600 in the Malta operation.

The company opened its headquarters in Malta in September 2006 employing 12 persons. The plan was to employ another 75 persons by end 2007 and the rest of the 500 employees when Smart City opens.

In the last week of August, the IT company shut its Malta operations with the headcount amounting to a dozen employees.

The closure of Atlas Technology Group went completely unnoticed with the IT Ministry, still headed by Austin Gatt, keeping a stony silence on the matter.

The only announcement was hidden in a release by AtlasTG published on Yahoo’s Biz news. In it, the company launched new software and said that “it has realigned the applications support staff to better serve the bulk of the current business, which is in North America.”

“The present customer base while requiring 24/7 support does not generate the volume of night time (US) workload to properly utilise the Malta support center. The company has closed the Malta support centre,” said AtlasTG

When setting its Malta centre, the company executive director, Robert Altinger said: "Atlas Technology Group wants to be one of the first ICT corporations to publicly declare our intention to be tenants in Smart City, where the presence of true state of the art communications infrastructure will give an enormous positive boost to our business.”

AtlasTG provides outsourced application software support services and software for clients with information technology functions worldwide. The company specializes in remotely supporting custom-built applications and networks using proprietary process, monitoring, and management systems.

In the press conference announcing AtlasTG operations in Malta on 19 September 2006, Minister Austin Gatt had said that: “Atlas’s reasons for choosing Malta confirmed that we [the government] have made the right choices over the past few years."