New Zealand accountants ‘did not backdate any documents’

Reacting to the story carried by The Malta Business Weekly last week, entitled ‘ New Zealand accountants backdated Malta trust documents’, Roger Thompson, director of Bentleys Chartered Accountants Limited, strongly denied it was New Zealand accountants who had backdated the documents.

The latest developments have their origin in the 2016 publication of the Panama Papers – documents from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, with a global investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Daphne Caruana Galizia collaborated informally with the Financial Review in April 2016 in research into the Panama Papers.

The allegation seems to have been made in a draft report by the Maltese investigative body, the FIAU.

In another report, also carried by the Australian Financial Review, Neil Chenoweth reported that days after the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia last October, an Australian businessman transferred ownership of Malta companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars to New Zealand – a move that effectively hid links to the family of the president of Azerbaijan.

The New Zealand transfers, signed by Australian financial executive Kenneth Ross Hetherington, followed an announcement by the European Bank Authority on November 9 that it had opened a preliminary inquiry into Pilatus Bank in Malta, which Ms Caruana Galizia covered extensively in the months before she was killed by a car bomb on October 16.

New Zealand financial consultants who spoke to The Australian Financial Review were puzzled by the decision to create new holding companies in New Zealand on Novem- ber 29, for companies in Malta which were already largely tax-free.

The move appears to have obscured the identity of the beneficiaries behind dozens of Pilatus Bank accounts at Pilatus Bank, as the EBA inquiry into Pilatus picked up.

Mr Hetherington told the Financial Review he could not provide confidential client information but “any suggestion that I have been directly or indirectly involved in any action to avoid European Banking Authority surveillance or for any other unlawful or improper purpose is entirely incorrect”.

The FIAU report found that Politically Exposed Persons in Azerbaijan provided most of the bank’s $300 million of assets and said the bank was “exposed to very high risks of Money Laundering and Funding of Terrorism without basic mitigating measures being applied”. It recommended a police investigation.

Police took no action. The FIAU director, Manfred Galdes, resigned in August 2016. The bank was cleared by the FIAU six days later.