False claim of Russian hit on Caruana Galizia hailed from Castille

A fantastical claim that Daphne Caruana Galizia had been assassinated in a Russian hit-job intended at destabilising the country, was concocted inside the Office of the Prime Minister together with a UK communications firm.

According to two sources who remember the events of 2018 inside the OPM, claims of a Russian plot behind the murder of the journalist were developed some time after consultants Chelgate were brought over to assist the Maltese government in its public relations abroad.

Although MaltaToday’s sources say they remember Chelgate’s (now former) employee Robert Winstanley at a desk in Castille, they think the firm was engaged by former chief of staff Keith Schembri. 

Winstanley’s name was mentioned this week by former government spokesperson Kurt Farrugia in the Caruana Galizia public inquiry.

Yet both the Principal Permanent Secretary, on behalf  of the OPM, and the foreign ministry’s permanent secretariat, have turned down Freedom of Information requests from MaltaToday for a copy of the contract for PR firm Chelgate. Malta’s principal permanent secretary said that Chelgate “was never contracted to render services to the OPM”.

But Winstanley was in talks with OPM staff in 2018, to make representations to the United Kingdom’s House of Commons committee on fake news, and denies that the government’s representatives had ever met directors from the controversial data mining firm Cambridge Analytica.

MaltaToday’s sources insist that it was at this time that the first whispers of the Russian hit-job started being shared inside the OPM. “It was meant to be suggested to the press that the Americans and English intelligence services were suspecting a Russian hit-job – but nobody took the bait.”

But while the OPM denies having seen the report alleging the Russian plot, even the two firms caught in the crossfire – reputation managers Chelgate and a Luxembourg private investigator’s firm – claim they were targeted in a deliberate act of disinformation.

Sandstone legal action

According to “excerpts” of the research published by Brussels newspaper EUobserver, the investigation would have posited that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev had conspired to assassinate Caruana Galizia, using a Chechen killer.

But Luxembourg private investigators Sandstone denied what it says are “false and damaging” allegations that it authored the ‘Russian hit-job’ report on behalf of Chelgate.

The Brussels newspaper was facing legal action for defamation by Sandstone, but the Luxembourg prosecutor is of the opinion that the matter should be dealt with in the Belgian jurisdiction. Sandstone director Frank Schneider told MaltaToday he was “looking into the option” of filing a complaint in Belgium.

Schneider insists that the Russian hit-job ‘report’ consists of material that the company had received but never made use of. “The report referred to by the EUobserver does exist, but it was not prepared by Sandstone or anyone working for Sandstone,” Schneider said.

Former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri

The question is: who supplied that kind of material in the first place? Government sources inside the OPM in 2018 told MaltaToday they remember Robert Winstanley as the only Chelgate employee present in meetings with communications staff. Today Winstanley runs his own communications firm, Halycon, a company registered in Malta.

At least five attempts to contact Winstanley by email and WhatsApp since January 2020 went unanswered over the past months. He answered on 20 July after this story was published on the web: “I never saw a report indicating that a Chechen killed Caruana Galizia. The first I read about that was in the EUobserver article after I left Chelgate.”

Sandstone’s Schneider claims the report was among material received from a variety of sources while researching the background to the Maltese controversies in 2018. “Sandstone took the view that the report was weak and unconvincing, and chose to make no use of it. It was never forwarded in any form to Chelgate, nor to any representative of the government of Malta, nor to any other third party. It, therefore, formed no part of any media briefings,” Schneider said. 

“The fact that this weak and inaccurate report was provided to the EUobserver, with false indications as to its usage, suggests an act of deliberate misinformation by a third party which by now has been identified by Sandstone and provided to the state prosecutor in support of the criminal investigation.”

Russian bogey-man

The arrests made in the Caruana Galizia assassination today could not be further from the conspiratorial and fantastical cloak-and-dagger theory that the journalist was targeted by foreign interests, ostensibly in a bid to destabilize the Maltese government.

But according to MaltaToday’s same sources, they had actively used “truthful” pieces of information with a Russian flavour to fuel suspicions in the press of a deliberate external act on the Maltese government, to deflect attention from Caruana Galizia’s stories.

One of those  instances  was a report in the French intelligence bulletin Intelligence Online, in which one of Caruana Galizia’s sources – the Russian, former Pilatus Bank employee Maria Efimova – was associated with Russian election meddling.

Efimova’s claim that Joseph Muscat’s wife was the owner of a secret Panamanian company Egrant in April 2017 was never proven: a costly and lengthy magisterial inquiry disproved most of the claims published by Caruana Galizia, even though it was unable to effectively prove who the company held by auditors Nexia BT was intended for ultimately.

But that a tactic in 2017 was employed to mix the very possible risk of Russian electoral meddling, with events targeting the Labour government, suggests a sophisticated degree of propaganda.

MaltaToday was the first newspaper to pick up the report in Intelligence Online when it arrived in this journalist’s (a long-time subscriber) mailbox on 24 May 2017 right in the middle of the election that kicked off straight after the Egrant allegation. Muscat was asked about the report, obliging that he was “aware of information from foreign intelligence services, of alleged Russian meddling in Malta’s election”. 

“All I know is that we were told to expect retribution for our role in hastening the visa waiver programme for Ukraine and after we stopped the refuelling of a Russian warship on the way to Syria,” Muscat said.

Echoing IntelligenceOnline.com’s report, Muscat said this information came from foreign agencies – supposedly  MI6 and the CIA. And although no connection was proven, Intelligence Online namedropped ‘Maria E’ and her employment with another Russian national and his remittance business in Malta.

The two sources who spoke to MaltaToday attested that the story came “directly from Labour HQ” during the election. “It was pushed to as many newspapers as possible, and it seems IntelligenceOnline took the story. It wasn’t a false story. It conflated a true story with real events of Russian meddling happening around Europe.” 

Another clear case of Maltese provenance was an Observer report on 27 May 2017, in which a “source working within its information technology agency” was quoted as saying that the Maltese government’s IT systems had seen a rise in attacks on its servers, “designed to damage the government”.

A confidential external risk assessment from MITA that was passed on to the newspaper by Labour government officials, identified the Fancy Bears – a hacking collective often associated with the Kremlin – as a prime suspect.

The newspaper report echoed the line that the attacks came after Muscat’s claims that “a foreign intelligence agency had suggested Malta would become a target for a Russian disinformation campaign.

Chelgate reaction

Chelgate has disputed the EUobserver article, insisting that it never commissioned the Russian hit-job report from either Sandstone or anyone else, nor that it had advanced such allegations. “In fact, nobody at Chelgate was aware of its existence until the publication of the libel. It appears to have been simply a research document submitted to Sandstone by a third party, and rejected by Sandstone that never passed it on to any third party.” 

Chelgate’s executive chairman Terence Fane-Saunders – with whom MaltaToday sources remember having met in Malta – later commented on his com-pany’s website, that the EUobserver report raises the question of how and why the report found its way to this publication, “and why Chelgate was targeted this way. A question that would have been interesting if it had not been quite so sinister”.

Fane-Saunders says Sandstone knows who arranged the report’s publication.

“From what we have been able to gather, this was disinformation, deliberately planted as part of a rather messy propaganda scrap between at least three international interests. Chelgate, it appears, was caught up in the crossfire,” the Chelgate chairman said.