Court authorises Joseph Muscat to pay €187,000 in pending bills

The Criminal Court has issued a variation order regarding the €30 million asset freeze it imposed on disgraced former Prime Minster Joseph Muscat last year.

Judge Edwina Grima authorised Muscat to use his three frozen bank accounts, two at Bank of Valletta and another held by an electronic money service provider EM@ney Plc, to settle some €187,000 in outstanding bills accumulated over the past several months.

According to the court order, Muscat can only use his accounts to pay a provisional tax settlement with the Inland Revenue Department of €118,298, €4,231 in unpaid stamp duties and €20,619 for outstanding VAT for 2024.

The court also authorised the disgraced former prime minister to settle a pending bill of over €25,000 for the tuition of his twin daughters at the elite QSI International School in Mosta and thousands of euros in arrears on personal loans and insurance.

In the order, published by the Assets Recovery Bureau Agency, the court also said that Muscat can use his frozen accounts to continue paying his monthly and yearly fees for a home loan, as well as health and home insurance.

Muscat is the first former prime minister of Malta to be arraigned in court and charged with bribery, corruption and money laundering, among other serious charges. When he was charged, the court imposed a freezing order on all his assets, including his bank accounts, totalling €30 million.

Muscat denies the charges and is fighting the imposition of the freezing order through separate court procedures, arguing that it is inflated.

His lawyers insist it should be limited to €60,000, which amounts to just three of the payments he received from Accutor AG — the same company that handled payments for the fraudulent hospital deal coordinated by Muscat’s government.

According to the  Vitals inquiry, the disgraced former prime minister began receiving payments from Accutor AG soon after he was forced to resign in 2019. The Swiss company was registered in 2017 and appears to have been set up to process payments from the government of Malta to the hospitals’ concession.

Muscat was to act as a senior advisor to the company funded by the VGH concession, earning him €15,000 a month for three years, which could be renewed for another three years. The Vitals inquiry suspects this consultancy agreement of being a channel for kickbacks. The owners of Accutor AG were the same owners involved in the VGH concession.

Two payments of €15,000 each were made to Muscat in March and April 2020 before UBS bank stopped the payments and froze Accutor AG’s accounts due to suspicions of money laundering and payment of kickbacks to a PEP (politically exposed person).

Accutor AG then started paying Muscat his €15,000 monthly fee through another Swiss company, Spring X Media AG, run by Pakistani businessman Wasay Bhatti, the owner of Accutor. Two payments were made to the disgraced former prime minister before they were stopped again due to suspicions of money laundering by the banks involved.

Muscat insists that these payments were not kickbacks.