A case of too little too late, with one very slight glimmer of hope

After all that has come to pass and all that has been reported about Pilatus Bank over the past year, and after every single authority has all but ignored the festering situation, at long last some form of action, however miniscule, was taken yesterday.

That was when the Malta Financial Services Authority, after a day-long meeting, censored the Pilatus Bank after its chairman was arrested in the United States and was charged with several counts of money laundering and fraudulent activity.

But given the severity of the charges levelled against the bank’s chairman on Tuesday – he is after all facing a maximum of 125 years of jail time - yesterday’s action was the very least the MFSA could have done.

Several Nationalist MPs labelled yesterday’s action as a case of ‘too little, too late’, and one Opposition MEP labelled it as no more than a media stunt, but the fact of the matter is that something, however little or however late, has been done from both a regulatory and a reputational point of view.

Then again, it was the very least that could have been done given the fact that the country’s correspondent banking relationships, perhaps especially those with the United States, are strained at best.

The MFSA’s supervisory council yesterday

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removed Ali Sadr Hasheminejad from any position he holds at Pilatus Bank, but refrained from revoking the banking license of the company as many having been calling for.

It also stripped him of voting rights, banned the bank from any transactions, including withdrawals or deposits, and it has required the bank to obtain the MFSA’s prior approval before effecting any movement of the its assets.

And the MFSA warned that it is also ‘considering other supervisory measures that may be applicable in the circumstances’.

This, however, fell short of Opposition demands for a complete revocation of the bank’s licences.

Such action may still be on the cards, but, in the meantime, if the MFSA is to put its figurative money where its mouth is, it should heed the Opposition Leader’s call for a full, independent investigation into the bank’s practices in Malta.

This, short of being a whitewashing exercise the likes of which we have seen in the past, could very well complement the US investigations, which the Maltese authorities, it seems, have hitherto not been involved in.

And in the meantime, the lengths to which the government will go to cover up anything untoward in its respect reached a whole new level yesterday when the issue of Pilatus Bank and the arrest of its chairman in the United States reached Parliament. Government MPs yesterday went to lengths to stress that what happened with the Pilatus Bank chairman had nothing to do with Malta, that the alleged offences had taken place in other countries, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is the chairman of the same bank who has been accused of such gross misconduct.

The finance minister even had the audacity to erroneously state that the licence was given to the bank at the beginning of 2013, and not at the beginning of 2014 under his own watch.

Those government MPs are, of course, completely wrong.

This is one and the same person and schemes such as those allegedly perpetrated against the United States could easily have been transposed to the Maltese context.

As the Opposition leader said yesterday, these matters absolutely must be investigated and they must be investigated independently because too many people who are too close to the centres of power in this country are too compromised in this affair for any real local investigation, for which we are not holding our breath, to have any meaningful impact whatsoever.