FCID sat on offer of information about social benefits fraud for months

The Financial Crimes Investigation Department (FCID) left a would-be whistleblower’s offer of information about the €10 million benefits-for-votes fraud racket hanging for two months, until a Superintendent from another unit read about it in media reports and questioned him.

The claim is one of several emerging from the reply filed today to an application by FCID inspector Shaun Friggieri in the compilation of evidence against Roger Agius and alleged co-conspirators Silvio Grixti, Emmanuel Spagnol, Dustin Caruana, and Luke Saliba.

Agius, one of the five men accused of running Labour’s fraudulent medical-benefits-for-votes scheme has now formally brought the matter to the attention of the presiding magistrate, Rachel Montebello.

In the reply, lawyers Jason Azzopardi and Kris Busietta on behalf of their client, Agius, a former canvasser and driver for junior minister Andy Ellul, said they wanted to bring the court up to speed on the facts which had preceded the application.

On November 28, last year, Agius had written to the Whistleblower Unit at the Office of the Prime Minister. “He had wanted to reveal sensitive, confidential and very grave details about how a ‘criminal octopus’, organised by the Ministry for Social Policy and the Office of the Prime Minister was the cause of the multimillion-euro social benefits fraud,” said the lawyers.

READ ALSO: Medical benefits fraud: 'FCID were ordered to investigate only 'from the doctor, down' would-be whistleblower says

The criminal conspiracy that Agius wanted to talk about allegedly involved public officials at the Office of the Prime Minister and a person of trust appointed by the Social Policy Minister, “who to this day are protected by the police, the Social Policy minister and the Prime Minister himself.” reads the application.

Agius said that during one of his interrogations at FCID, he had told Inspector Shaun Friggieri that he could provide information about another large-scale fraud racket, involving police officers presenting fake sick leave certificates. This request was made repeatedly during his interrogation, both by the suspect and his lawyer, but the Inspector had steadfastly refused to take him before the duty magistrate, Agius said.

Instead, the application reads, Inspector Friggieri had told Agius that another police unit would be getting in touch with him about the information, and nearly two months later, he had been called in for questioning on April 16.

Agius says that he had received no further communication from the police since that day and none of the people that he identified had been charged.

He alleges that while he had been giving that statement, the Superintendent who had sent for him had told Agius and his lawyer that she had done so because she had read a news article about the claims made in one of Agius’ applications and that nobody from the police force had spoken to her about it.

During that interrogation, he says, he had only been asked questions about individual citizens who he had helped obtain fake medical certificates, instead of being asked about the police officers that he had offered to inform on.

“The court should know that in the last few months, Roger Agius has both spoken and written publicly, accusing Marc Calleja, a person of trust employed by Minister Michael Falzon, known as Gulija of being the ringleader and the brains behind the social benefits abuse racket, and that he had accepted many thousands of euros worth of bribes, and had even given him a burner phone to communicate with him only about this racket, and that up till 2023, Roger Agius was still delivering the paperwork and applications for other social benefits to this Marc Calleja so that certain individuals pass the medical board.”

“Bearing all this in mind, Roger Agius is declaring that not only does he have a crumb of trust left in the Police, especially the FCID leadership and the Commissioner of Police, but he is determined and decided that never and under no circumstances will her entrust a smidgen of information to the Police, which to date, has done everything possible to protect the ringleader of the criminal organisation behind this racket. Such is its zeal to protect the politicians and public officials involved in this racket that it has not requested a magisterial inquiry into one of the biggest scandals involving fraudulent use of public funds that we have seen in decades.”

Agius alleged that the determination to protect the Minister and Social Policy Ministry from the criminal consequences of their actions and omissions was so great that the FCID had left it up to the same ministry to email them the files they wanted, instead of seizing them from the ministry building themselves. This resulted in the files relating to social benefits abuse involving residents of the 9th and 10th electoral districts - “which also happen to be the Social Policy Minister’s constituencies” not being sent to the FCID for investigation.