Former civil servant takes €30,000 in remuneration after Brait resignation

One of the government's foremost top civil servants whose role in the Dalligate investigation opened her up to accusations of impropriety, has resigned from South African investment firm Brait SE with a final remuneration of $40,000 (€30,290).

Rita Schembri, 47, resigned her post as non-executive director of Brait in April 2013 shortly after resigning as head of the Prime Minister's internal audit and investigations department (IAID) in March, just weeks after an investigation by National Audit Office accused her of several ethics breaches.

The Brait annual report said Schembri had resigned "for personal reasons".

Schembri had suspended herself from work in December 2012 after civil service head Godwin Grima forwarded the allegations of conflicts of interest to the NAO, for investigation.

Formerly a member on the supervisory committee of OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud agency, Schembri was revealed to have been providing consultancy on a share acquisition of the Casinò di Venezia of Vittoriosa, undeclared to her superiors.

Her conflict was flagged by a whistleblower after her name came to prominence in the Dalligate investigation: John Dalli, the former European commissioner, questioned her double role as a member of the supervisory committee of OLAF, and her assistance to OLAF director Giovanni Kessler in conducting an investigation on Dalli in Malta.

As head of the IAID, Schembri assisted Kessler in the investigation on John Dalli and Silvio Zammit.

The NAO investigation had revealed that Schembri was promoted to the grade of permanent secretary shortly after the completion of the Dalli investigation in September 2012, with no apparent justification for the upgrade in her title.

But she recused herself from her role on the OLAF supervisory committee's assessment of the Dalli investigation, having been part of the investigation in Malta as early as June 2012. She eventually resigned her post on the committee on 16 March 2013.

The damning NAO report raised serious doubts about Schembri's suitability to head the IAID, declaring she had lied under oath. Such was the extent to which Schembri tried to mislead the NAO's board about her abuse, that the Auditor General's office had to remark how saddened it was at "the irony" of the highly paid permanent secretary "having committed these offences when serving in the role of across-government champion of governance... wherein nothing short of exemplary behaviour is expected".