American grime story: reformed money launderer Kenneth Rijock’s defamation past

In one of Kenneth Rijock’s recent missives against former prime minister Joseph Muscat, the American “financial crimes blogger” claims a statue of Muscat will be unveiled in Valletta in 2021. The image of the alleged statue is lifted from a MaltaToday April Fool’s post of 2014.

It is one of many episodes in which Rijock finds himself overreaching, ever since he alleged that Muscat could be extradited to the US to face a money laundering charge. According to the Miami lawyer, Muscat has embezzled $300 million in “currency, precious gems, metals, financial instruments, smuggled cigarettes, illicit tuna, oil and petroleum products.” The extraordinary allegation is tied to a thread of truth: he claims investigators are looking at records from Pilatus Bank, Satabank, Bank of Valletta (BOV), Portmann Capital Management and Sparkasse Bank Malta – all banks that have been in the eye of investigators in the last years.

Rijock’s volley of claims have been hard for Muscat to ignore. In September 2020, Muscat accused him of concocting “weird conspiracies” and denounces his allegations as “hogwash”. “To make it clear: this convicted felon and fraudster claims that an authority told him it is doing something that the same authority does not do. This further confirms that this person is a not-so-good con artist who can only find fertile ground with the gullible.”

According to OffshoreAlert, Rijock is a disbarred attorney who, in 1990, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the IRS and one count of racketeering at federal court in Gainesville, Florida, for which he received a 24-month prison sentence.

After being released from prison, he began promoting himself as a ‘reformed money launderer’, regularly speaking at Anti-Money Laundering conferences and operating as a consultant and writer in the areas of financial crime and compliance, most notably working on behalf of Know Your Customer database provider World-Check and serving as “Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Consultant” for Florida-based Mutual Benefits Corporation.

But this company was closed down by Florida regulators in 2004 after perpetrating a $1 billion Ponzi scheme, for which 13 participants were subsequently criminally convicted, including the scheme’s mastermind, career fraudster Joel Steinger, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2014.

Rijock today has become a darling of the anti-Muscat brigade on social media, alleging that the former prime minister has been a major criminal mastermind all along. By latching onto already published stories concerning Muscat, Rijock stretches the truth to the far frontiers of the almost-possible but so far has never backed up the allegations he metes out.

That a similar pattern of behaviour already exists cannot be denied. In October 2019, Rijock was found to have “falsely” accused an Israeli attorney, Steven Slom, of involvement in serious financial crime. A Miami judge ruled that the “undisputed record” showed that Rijock “published false and defamatory statements about Slom”, claiming that the attorney was a money launder and a criminal, and even of being not licensed to practice law in Israel and that he “exploits women”. Rijock submitted no evidence to support any of his affirmative defences.

That was the second time in two years that Rijock had lost a defamation complaint in the United States, with a default being entered against him at federal court in Miami in 2017 in an action brought by Canadian firm Northland Wealth Management Inc., which accused him of using his ‘Financial Crime Blog’ to conduct a “malicious and relentless campaign of fake news” as revenge for Northland preventing an elderly client from transferring funds to a Florida firm for which Rijock was “chief compliance officer”. Northland obtained a default order against Rijock, but did not pursue damages and the case was closed.

This pattern of blogs in this case is eerily identical and systematic as in his most recent volley of posts. In their complaint, Northland asked what they had done to “attract the attention, and the malicious ire” of Rijock. “They had the audacity to ask questions about whether a company – whose so-called compliance program was run by Rijock – was an appropriate investment for an elderly client. Indeed, within 48 hours after Northland’s termination of the client relationship that prompted these questions, Rijock commenced his campaign of revenge and retaliation against plaintiffs, beginning with a September 2, 2015 blog posting accusing Northland of being ‘behind’ a (completely imaginary) ‘$450m trading scam’, purportedly perpetrated by an (entirely made up) ‘Cayman Gang of Four’.”

Rijock spent the next 18 months in a storm of fake news postings in which he accused Northland of committing fraud, ‘grand theft’, and “egregious criminal conduct” – over 100 different statements which Northland complained were designed to decimate their professional and personal reputations.

Rijock’s barrage of ‘news’, which more often than not cites unnamed, confidential sources with speculative titbits on investigations yet to be revealed, has found its audience in Malta.

But it is clear that his more ardent fans enjoy the sight of his brazen accusations of Joseph Muscat’s alleged international mega-criminality, rather than questioning whether Rijock’s information is indeed correct. To boot, he has been amply reposted by Nationalist MPs on the frontline of the ‘anti-Muscat’ campaign and several news outlets.

Rijock has now set himself up as the holder of secrets which could easily be proven, yet he does not: on 14 December he claimed a whistleblower on Muscat’s criminal activities was almost run over by the police and that he had photos to prove it, but he did not publish them. The whistleblower, he claims, managed to get out of harm’s way just as the rogue police car threatened to kill him...

And adding further to the script that writes itself... Muscat would be at the heart of some Eastern European criminal organisation. Citing “sources known to be reliable”, Rijock claims Muscat held private meetings with leaders of Eastern European organized crime groups who had been doing business with him “for years” and that they are “genuinely afraid that Muscat will roll over on them, their illicit operations, and all the individuals that he personally dealt with, in order to save himself from that dreaded 20-year sentence for money laundering which is staring him in the face come 2021.”

He also claims US government sources told him that Muscat is a named co-defendant in a pending money laundering and financial crime case.

There is no doubt that Rijock is fed snippets of ‘quasi-possible’ events from the Maltese rumour mill. By claiming that murdered banker Christian Pandolfino was a “money launderer”, he adds egregious speculation to Pandolfino’s role as a financial expert.

So... whistleblowers hunted down by the Maltese police... a disgraced former PM at the heart of an Eastern European crime ring... and a Sliema home invasion with financial crime at its heart. At some point, the Rijock arc of events starts becoming hard to keep track of.

Perhaps he is sufficiently distant from the island to peddle half-baked theories despite not having any reasonable access to local investigators. At some point, he will be either vindicated with a final reveal that – given the way the script is going – would see Muscat behind bars or accused in the States.

Or he might just fade into a historical line-up of political conspirators, crowdfunded along the way by avid readers.