Carmen Ciantar’s bribery allegations: Where are they coming from?

Several news reports have cropped up in recent weeks alleging bribery towards former FMS CEO Carmen Ciantar in the VGH hospitals deal. 

The reports are appearing almost exclusively in Pakistani media, and each website is publishing the same exact news article word-for-word. 

Daily Pakistan, Samaa English TV, The Pakistan Daily, Global Village Space, Dunya News and Pakistan Observer all reported the allegations on 31 May. They kick off the story with the fact that Ram Tumuluri’s company recently signed a Rs2,800-crore deal to supply e-buses to Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport and warns that he is facing fresh allegations of corruption involving Deputy Prime Minister Chris Fearne’s office. 

MaltaToday is informed that an unnamed international public relations company had been trying, through intermediaries, to offer the Ciantar story to Maltese media organisations. The effort failed since the claims could not be substantiated.

Obscure Pakistani news sites 

Sources in Pakistan have told MaltaToday that Daily Pakistan is not widely read in the country. “It has no standing or existence here. It hardly exists even in Pakistan,” they said. 

While it has an English-language news site, its newspaper is only presented online in Urdu.  

Attempts to reach Daily Pakistan over the story were unsuccessful. The article was unsigned. 

Sources also told MaltaToday that Global Village Space is no longer in print, but its online portal is being regularly updated. However, its owner, Moeed Pirzada fled the country after the fall of Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan. 

Another report surfaced on 8 June on all the Pakistani outlets. The report makes reference to alleged documentary evidence showing that a company linked to VGH made several suspicious payments to Ciantar between 2015 and 2016.  

The article goes into more detail over the payments structure. It says that Glotal Finance Inc, which received payments linked to Ciantar, was wholly owned by Dahlia Investments Ltd, a company based in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

READ ALSO: ‘Hidden hand’ peddling corruption stories to discredit Chris Fearne

Weird FATF reference 

A separate news article reported by Global Village Space, The Nation and Daily Pakistan explained the Steward Health Care announced that it will be pulling out of Malta after a court rescinded its concession to run three government hospitals. 

However, this news report claims that the development comes “shortly after the FATF put Malta on the grey list after identifying serious structural deficiencies in Malta’s governance and regulation”. 

Malta had been placed on the FATF grey list in 2021 due to deficiencies in the fight against tax evasion and the way ultimate beneficiary owners are listed. However, Malta was taken off the list a year later, making the reference to FATF for Steward’s withdrawal sound incongruent to the facts at hand. 

Steward announced its withdrawal from Malta earlier this year after a judge rescinded the hospitals contract because of fraud and unfulfilled milestones. The American company has appealed the decision.

Ukrainian site inaccessible from Malta 

Apart from Pakistan, a news report also surfaced on Ukrainian website censor.net. The report says that an Austria-based businessman with close links to Russian oligarch Leonid Levitin wired €3.2 million to Carmen Ciantar’s daughter, Celine. She has wholly denied the allegation. 

Ukrainian journalist Tetiana Nikolayenko said that Leonid Levitin’s Maltese passport is under scrutiny in view of the suspicious payment. She said Fearne was a close associate of Jonathan Cardona, who headed the golden passport programme at the time. But the report gives short shrift to the fact that Cardona, if anything, was in former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s close circle of confidantes and had nothing to do with Fearne. 

According to Nikolayenko, an agreement between the parties saw Levitin receive a Maltese passport after Rezchikov allegedly transferred €3.2 million in 2019. 

However, the article and website is unavailable in Malta, and accessible only with a VPN.

EU Reporter pulls down article 

This article was later reprinted in the EU Reporter. Colin Stevens, editor-in-chief at EU Reporter, told MaltaToday that the article was sent to them by the author, with no payment made or received from the author by the mediahouse. 

However, the article has since been temporarily removed from the EU Reporter after Celine Camilleri Ciantar issued a right of reply to the mediahouse in which she denied all the allegations, including knowing the people mentioned in the report. “The article has been temporarily removed whilst we carry out enhanced fact checks,” Stevens said.

READ ALSO: Police, magistrate yet to summon Carmen Ciantar for questioning