FIAU witness spends 15 minutes in custody after refusing to name names in court
A representative from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit was momentarily taken into custody on Monday morning after she refused to name Keith Schembri and Adrian Hillman while testifying in court. “You cannot pick and choose [what to testify about]," magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech told the FIAU representative as she ordered a court marshall to take her into custody for contempt of court. “I feel sorry for her. You put her in this situation,” the magistrate told lawyers from the attorney general’s office prosecuting the case. The witness was summoned to testify in the case against Zenith Finance directors Matthew Pace and Lorraine Falzon, who face money laundering charges related to investigations into former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri. The FIAU representative told the court that the agency had fined MFSP – as Zenith was previously known - €38,750 in 2018 for administrative shortcomings after analysts noted “discrepancies” in the “basic and generic” information provided by the company. But when defence lawyer Mark Vassallo, citing a letter sent to the company by the FIAU, asked the witness to name two specific people with who MFSP had “established business...