Updated | Dalli meets Muscat to explain Bahamas trip details

Former EU Commissioner John Dalli yesterday evening met Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, together with Dalli's two daughters, to give an explanation on his Bahamas trip back in the summer of 2012.

Dalli was asked to give an explanation on his business connections to the island after claims that he had organised a $100 million money transfer surfaced in the International Herald Tribune.

MaltaToday is informed that Dalli was told by the Office of the Prime Minister to publish all documentation to his trip. "The only surprising thing coming out of the meeting was the fact that OLAF knew of the Bahamas trip back in November 2012. We thought this fact had only been made known last week, when we heard about it," an OPM source told MaltaToday.

The company in whose name former EU Commissioner John Dalli's daughter rented out a Bahamas villa, belongs to financier Martin Zuch, the founder of a Christian evangelical children's' charity Give Hope International. Zuch became sole shareholder of the firm in December 2012, after its former shareholder Derrick Germaine, a Christian book publisher, left the company.

Dalli, who resigned over allegations that he was aware of a multi-million bribe to reverse anti-smoking laws back in October 2012, is back in the eye of a storm surrounding a July 7-8 trip he made to the Bahamas in a private jet, ostensibly to transfer millions in US dollars.

Barry Connor, the landlord of a Bahamas villa rented by Dalli's daughter Claire Gauci Borda in the name of Tyre Ltd, was reported telling the International Herald Tribune last week that Dalli claimed to him that he was seeking a way of transferring millions in US dollars.

Connor told The Times yesterday that Dalli told him he "intended setting up a trust in the name of his daughters with money from Dubai.... Then I was told it was coming from Chase Manhattan Bank in New York."

But Dalli has denied the alleged $100 million transfer initially reported by the Herald, or any link between his Bahamas trips and the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF's investigation in which he was embroiled at the time.

Instead he has claimed that his Bahamas trips were in the name of a philanthropic initiative with Africa as its target continent.

Although the former commissioner remains cagey about details, the company Tyre Ltd - whose registered address is Dalli's address in Portomaso, St Julian's - has as its sole shareholder Martin Zuch, a fund manager with over 20 years' experience who started his career in the City of London in 1987 with Merrill Lunch, and is now a director-shareholder of fledgling Jubilee Oil & Gas. The UK-based energy company states on its website that it aims to produce gas and oil products ethically and sustainably, with minimal environmental impact.

In 2006, Zuch founded the Give Hope charity, to educate children in African countries by funding schooling for over 400 children.

Zuch's connection with the Dalli family is also through Kingdom Trust Traders, a commodities marketing company based in Malta created in 2012, which says on its website that it uses its "business opportunities to underwrite the rescue of desperate people groups such as hungry and abused children, human trafficking, oppressed women, and others around the world."

MaltaToday has not yet established whether Kingdom Trust Traders may be the trading name of Tyre Ltd, whose deals in the trade of precious metals.

Zuch appears as Kingdom Trust Traders' East Africa representative, while Dalli's son-in-law Adrian Gauci Borda appears as KTT's representative for Europe.

In a February 2013 video interview for a religious-themed interview, Zuch mentions that his charity was focused on creating "self-sustaining projects in Ethiopia".

Connor, whom Dalli claims is a scorned client who tried to have a "suspicious" financial transaction processed with the help of his daughter, also reported the former commissioner's Bahamas trip to OLAF.

The EU anti-fraud agency was informed about Dalli's stay in the Bahamas last November and passed on the information to the Malta police a month later.

Dalli was later questioned on the matter by the police throughout the investigation concerning OLAF's own inquiry into the alleged €60 million bribe.

OLAF did not pursue the complaint, which it described as being a civil matter.