Money laundering report filed in Latvia

10 June 2019

Summary

As Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family, we are committed to achieving full justice for her and for her investigations. We believe that the best ways to do this are to force accountability and to activate judicial authorities.

On 30 May, we filed a 31-page Suspicious Transaction Report with Latvia’s Office for the Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity.

The STR names members of the money laundering network whom Daphne Caruana Galizia investigated and whom we believe are connected to her subsequent murder.

Press release

Daphne Caruana Galizia was the only journalist who investigated Pilatus Bank before her murder on 16 October 2017. The Iranian-owned bank in Malta was possibly part of a larger money laundering network for Azerbaijani and Maltese government officials and their associates and family members.

European regulators ignored Pilatus Bank even when it became clear that Malta’s government was attempting to cover up oversight of the bank as it stashed away hundreds of millions of dollars from Maltese and Azerbaijani PEPs.

We now know, as a result of the Daphne Project’s investigations, that Latvia’s ABLV Bank, like Pilatus Bank in Malta, was a service provider to a money laundering network implicating PEPs in Malta and in Azerbaijan.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was left alone to document the crimes facilitated by Pilatus Bank and the subsequent cover up of those crimes by Malta’s government. She refused to give up or to give in and people in the network she investigated resorted to assassination.

ABLV

Martins Bunkus, a Latvian lawyer who fought for ABLV Bank to be liquidated involuntarily, was also murdered in a well-planned attack, just seven months later. His murder, like Daphne Caruana Galizia’s, remains unsolved.

That Maltese and Latvian regulators allowed Pilatus Bank and ABLV Bank to continue operating even as evidence of serious crimes committed by those institutions was brought to light shows that the EU’s weakest states are facilitating crime throughout Europe’s internal market. The fact that two people attempting to force effective oversight were murdered in well-planned attacks, within less than a year of each other, and that in both cases the people who ordered the murders are still unknown, shows that Europe is experiencing a crime and corruption emergency and it is only a matter of time before someone else is killed.

Report

As Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family, we are committed to achieving full justice for her and for her investigations. We believe that the only way out of the crime and corruption emergency is to continue forcing accountability and to activate judicial authorities, though the responsibility for achieving this is not ours alone.

On 30 May, we filed a 31-page Suspicious Transaction Report with Latvia’s Office for the Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity. The STR names members of the money laundering network whom Daphne Caruana Galizia investigated and whom we believe are connected to her subsequent murder.

We hope that this report brings new evidence to light, helps authorities across Europe bring criminals to justice and helps authorities prevent more murders by taking action to end impunity for the crimes and criminal networks that Daphne Caruana Galizia investigated and exposed. We also hope that others will recognise that they too are able to force accountability and will be inspired to take the necessary action to end impunity and restore the rule of law.