MLRO FOR PILATUS BANK, ANTONIELLA GAUCI, IS NOW ALLEGEDLY RICH. WHY IS THAT?

Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, Claude-Ann Sant Fournier and Antoniella Gauci

ANTONIELLA GAUCI, the former Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO), Accounting Officer and Risk Manager for the closed Pilatus Bank, shut down by the European Central Bank for massive money laundering, is single, unemployable, and extremely wealthy. Gauci, as we have previously reported in NGO says Malta's Attorney General Signed Secret Dismissal of Money Laundering charges in Pilatus Bank Case (October 24, 2022) is suspected of being one of the two senior Pilatus executives that is the Attorney General secretly ordered not charged with money laundering crimes, notwithstanding a magistrate's order for her indictment.

She is known to have been the subject of a special personal demand, made by former Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, that her name be removed from any possibly of prosecution. Readers of our coverage may recall that Gauci was literally caught in the act, by a team of video journalists, removing evidence from Pilatus Bank, in the dead of night, in the company of Pilatus Bank owner, the Iranian national, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad. She literally ran away from the cameras, towards her automoble, refusing to be interviewed, in an incident that has forever enshrined her as the face of Maltese corruption and financial crime.

The documents removed from the Pilatus safe by Gauci are believed to include corporate documents from the offshore Panamanian corporation, EGRANT, which the whistleblower, former Pilatus employee Maria Efimova, swore contained proof that MICHELLE MUSCAT, the wife of the disgraced former Maltese PM, was the Beneficial Owner of the company, which reportedly received bribes and kickbacks intended for JM.

Reliable sources within Malta's ruling Labour Party have asserted that Gauci had threatened to publicly reveal all the details about Egrant ownership, as well as the transfer of documents to her car with Sadr in the middle of the night. As the result, our sources report that she is being regularly and repeatedly allegedly paid for her silence. Given her notoriety. Gauci represents a huge potential liability, and nobody in Malta's financial industry is willing to employ her.

Whether Gauci is ultimately charged with money laundering by an American criminal court is a question on the minds of many in the European Union, given that Pilatus was involved in the transfer of many millions of US Dollars from Venezuela, remains an open question. Stay tuned.