Objection, Your Honour! ‘Your cars should be mine’, Christian Borg insists

Tista’ taqra dan l-artiklu bil-Malti

He is facing charges of kidnapping apart from being investigated for other crimes, including money laundering and drug trafficking, but Christian Borg felt it appropriate to contest a decision to stop a €3 million contract in which he was to supply cars to the judiciary, including those deciding his case.

Borg has filed a formal objection, saying the Contracts Department had taken the decision based on the wrong interpretation of the five-year tender with the sole aim of “invalidating the company’s (Borg’s) offer.”

The Shift revealed last week that the judiciary pressured the prime minister to cancel the contract. They also threatened to boycott the use of these cars if the government persisted in giving this contract to Christian Borg.

Borg is a former client and partner of Prime Minister Robert Abela. They had even entered into business together over a property deal in Żabbar through which Abela made some €45,000 at a time when he was a consultant to the Planning Authority.

The tender won by Borg’s company, Princess Operations Ltd, which Borg claims owns some 1,500 cars, was now “found to be administratively non-compliant”.

In his complaint, Borg said the Department of contracts was also wrong in assuming that the daily benchmark rate – €12.11 a day for each car – was unrealistic.

“Should the Evaluation Committee have required clarification on such issue, the company would have shown that its operation of roughly about 1,500 vehicles for car-rentals and leasing enables it to have insurance rates at preferential rates and to be able to apply different rates and costings in order to be able to quote daily rates which in the context of car leasing are better than those of its competitors in the market.”

At 29, Borg has amassed a multi-million-euro fortune, including unexplained wealth. Yet he objected to the Contracts Department due diligence exercise, which found that some of the contracts submitted as evidence of the company’s leasing contracts – all with government departments including the Asylum Agency (AWAS), Wasteserv, the Commissioner of Police and Malta Enterprise – were not supplied by the company but by Borg himself.

While admitting that this was true, his lawyer Albert Libreri said, “it should be noted that Christian Borg is the ultimate sole shareholder of the company” and that “the income was applied to the accounts of the company, which is the reason why the company declares such contracts as its own”.

Having an already colourful past, Borg was charged with kidnapping, among other criminal acts, earlier this year. Despite these red flags, he was still allowed to submit a bid for a government tender later in the year – and won.

Following the accusations filed against him, Borg resigned from all his positions as director in his companies. Instead, he hired Joe Camenzuli – the official photographer of the Labour Party.