Epress.am News from Armenia
The family members of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galicia, murdered in 2017, have urged EuroPol to provide the investigators, judges and prosecutors investigating and trying the case of her murder with all the necessary information related to money laundering executed between Malta and Azerbaijan through the United Arab Emirates.
“Three years after our mother uncovered Keith Schembry’s financial crimes, who was the head of Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s administration, and two years after her murder, Schembri finally resigned. We now demand from the Maltese authorities to prosecute Schembri for his large-scale and long-standing criminal activities,” reads the press statement released by the journalist’s family members.
The 56-year-old Daphne Caruana Galicia was murdered on October 16, 2017 due to the explosion of a car parked near her home. She was a critic of the Maltese authorities and was investigating their links to the Panama offshore leaks.
Galicia’s latest investigation was related to Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his aides who were closely linked with the Panama offshores, selling passports to Azerbaijan and making money.
Two weeks before the murder, the journalist reported to the police that she was receiving death threats.
The scandal around the “Panama Papers” erupted in 2019, when German Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper leaked the documents of a Panama-based Law firm called “Mossack Fonseca”. The Panama leaks showed the offshore tax evasion schemes executed by many world leaders. The Panama Papers had information about Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.
Mossack Fonseca’s papers uncovered how Ilham Aliyev’s daughters, Leila and Arzu Aliyevas, set up offshore companies for their gold extraction business and were receiving 70% of the profits from gold mining in Azerbaijan. The Panama Papers documented that in 2006, Azerbaijan’s president allocated rights for 6 gold mines to one British and three offshore companies.
Mossack Fonseca also reveal that Leila and Arzu Aliyevas own the Panama-based Londex Resources S.A. company, which in its turn owns 45% of the gold consortium. It turns out that the Aliyev family owns about 56% of the revenues of the second largest gold extracting company in Azerbaijan. Fargate Mining Corporation is also managed by someone close to the Aliyev family, Nasib Hasanov.
The Panama Papers also show that the Aliyev family also owns Redgold Estates Azerbaijan Ltd offshore company, which is trying to obtain a gold mining license in Kyrgyzstan.
The leaked Panama Papers contain over 11.5mln documents, which confirm ownership of offshore assets of around 140 officials from 50 countries, including 12 current and past heads of states who used more than 214.000 offshore companies.