Brian Tonna says he treated Mizzi ‘just like a walk-in client’ when he opened Panama company

Auditor Brian Tonna told a parliamentary committee that he suffered a “pogrom” for having opened offshore companies for former energy minister Konrad Mizzi and the former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri.

An animated Tonna told MPs in the public accounts committee that even though he had been part of the Enemalta selection board on the gas plant project, he was always unaware who the owner of 17 Black and Macbridge was.

But MPs struggled to understand how Tonna, placed on an Enemalta selection board for the LNG plant, could not have questioned Konrad Mizzi’s interest in opening an offshore company. “Didn’t you think you had to sit this one out after having served the same minister at Enemalta?” committee chair Beppe Fenech Adami asked.

Tonna demured, having claimed he had not really known Mizzi before. “I treated him as a walk-in client,” he told the committee, even though Mizzi had been brought over by an unidentified third party, possibly Keith Schembri himself.

“I don’t care if you don’t believe me... I am speaking under oath and I care about the magistrates believing me,” Tonna pointedly told committee chair Beppe Fenech Adami as he was challenged about the setting-up of Schembri’s and Mizzi’s offshore companies.

Tonna’s firm opened the Panama companies through the offices of Mossack Fonseca, with references for banks indicating the origin of the funds for the offshore companies would hail from 17 Black and Macbridge – today known to be the companies of Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech and Cheng Chen, who consulted on the Electrogas plant.

“There was just the one email that stated as such... and I have explained many times that the figures mentioned there had been suggested by MF to the banks, because these banks demanded a certain level of turnover. It was just one email,” Tonna said.

He also claimed he had assumed at the time that 17 Black and Macbridge were companies related to either gaming or waste recycling, because that was the intended source of revenues for the Panama companies opened by Schembri and Mizzi.

Nationalist MPs disputed his lack of curiosity over the source of funds for the Schembri-Mizzi companies. “Parameters for the bank accounts was not even reached, due dilegence not even carried out by the banks... it simply died there and then,” Tonna told the PAC.

Tonna also claimed he later “was not pleased” at finding out in 2018 from the press that 17 Black had been Yorgen Fenech’s, one of the shareholders in the Electrogas project.

Tonna’s counsel Stephen Tonna Lowell often called MPs’ attention to the fact that his client, who is facing charges of money laundering, had the right to be silent on questions that concerned ongoing criminal charges.