Ex-MITA employee used personal E-ID to submit false documents for permit applications

A man from Nepal has testified to having paid €4,000 in order to apply for a work permit in Malta on the basis of a fake employment contract that was allegedly forged by a former government IT agency employee.

The compilation of evidence against Andre D’Amato from Mosta, an ICT professional and company director who was formerly employed by government IT agency MITA, continued before magistrate Leonard Caruana on Wednesday.  D’Amato is accused of human trafficking, money laundering, computer misuse, forgery of official documents, using forged documents, fraud, and making false declarations to public authorities.

Between 2018 and May this year, when the crimes are alleged to have taken place, D’Amato had been employed by MITA.  He was appointed as Malta’s non-resident ambassador to Cuba last year.

Testifying today was Magar Dil Bahadur from Nepal. He told the court that before travelling to Malta he had sent €4,000 to a Malta-resident Nepalese friend of his in order to obtain a Maltese work permit.

The prosecution is claiming that the friend then passed the money on to D’Amato in order for him to apply for the work permit, apparently on behalf of his clients, amongst them a San Gwann-based company named KSL.

But the director of the company cited as Bahadur’s employer on a contract that was submitted with the work permit application had testified in an earlier sitting, telling the court that he had never heard of Bahadur and that the contract  had been forged, together with his signature, on a letterhead featuring the company’s logo, which had apparently been downloaded from its official website.

KSL’s director had smelled a rat when Bahadur, whom he had never seen before, appeared one day at the company offices asking him to sign a form to confirm a change in Bahadur’s employer.

Bahadur told the court that when he had gone to the company’s offices, he was informed that KSL had not filed the original application for Bahadur’s work permit, and that the documents and signatures had been faked.

KSL’s director had then filed a police report, informing the authorities that the application had been filed without the company’s knowledge, using forged documents.

Police investigators found that the fake contracts had been submitted to the government agency Identita’ as part of Bahadur’s residence application. It had emerged during the investigation that the application had been filed online using D’Amato’s e-ID, the user’s identity having also been confirmed through 2-factor authentication.

Bahadur confirmed in court that he had not worked for KSL, adding that when he had gone to the company’s office in San Gwann, he was told that the documents he was asking them to sign were not genuine.

Cross-examined by Franco Debono, who is assisting D’Amato together with lawyer Alfred Abela, the witness said he had never met the accused and didn’t know him. “I just spoke over the phone once. When I went to KSL once, the police arrested me.”

Abela made submissions on the prosecution’s request for a full download of the data on D’Amato’s electronic devices, arguing that he had objected to a full download at the first sitting. “If the charges relate to these particular people it is purely a fishing expedition to download everything,” said the lawyer.

“In order to investigate or carry out a search on a person, I need to have reasonable suspicion. More so before downloading all this man’s data in the hope of maybe finding something. It is not in keeping with the spirit of the law.”

Debono argued that there was “a lack of control over the environment in which the extractions are performed, how and where the extracted data is stored and so on.”

Private conversations with third parties unrelated to this issue should not end up in evidence, argued the lawyer.

The prosecution rebutted the argument, as the defence would have the opportunity to put these questions to the expert who performs the extractions on witness stand, but could not do so pre-emptively.

Debono suggested that the IT experts involved “were not accredited” to do so and cited a case where the court had ordered that the entire extraction process be documented on video, but Inspector Roberts was having none of it.

“In the past, it used to be the police’s Cybercrime Unit that would carry out extractions. After this practice was challenged, today that duty is carried out by court-appointed experts. Are we now saying that this is also wrong? We might as well stop carrying out extractions then.”

Magistrate Leonard Caruana announced that he will issue a decree on the matter from chambers, before adjourning the case to September.

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