Protecting Konrad’s mate

Disgraced former minister Konrad Mizzi’s right-hand man, lawyer Aron Mifsud Bonnici, was finally arraigned in court.  He is charged with money laundering and making false declarations.

More than €1.6 million of his assets were frozen. Court testimony revealed that he acquired several properties, one of which had no evidence of payment. He then sold another two properties in a short space of time.

He made suspicious transactions from his savings account to a Swiss Bank account.  Serious discrepancies were identified between his tax declarations and the money he held in his various bank accounts.  For 2015 and 2021, he submitted no tax declarations.

Mifsud Bonnici has a long and chequered past.  His name cropped up in all of Mizzi’s dodgy deals – from Enemalta, to the ITS DB deal, the Montenegro windfarm and the fraudulent public hospitals’ concession.

He was found to have links with Chinese Mao Haibin, a business partner of the notorious Cheng Chen, who negotiated the €320 million Enemalta deal and who had secret company Torbridge set up for him by Nexia BT.

Cheng Chen’s mother-in-law, who was exposed as the “owner” of the notorious MacBridge offshore company, also had close business links to Mao Haibin, who was given the concession by the Maltese government to sell Maltese residency permits to Chinese citizens.

Mifsud Bonnici co-owned Asiatica Corporate Services Ltd with Mao Haibin.

For years, Mifsud Bonnici had a finger in every one of former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s and Mizzi’s stinking pies.  Despite being Mizzi’s personal defence lawyer, he was also put on every board possible.

He was Projects Malta director between 2014 and 2015 and then its Board secretary between 2014 and 2018 when all the dodgy deals were struck.

He was Board secretary at MITA, the State’s IT agency. He was Enemalta company secretary.  He held key positions at ARMS Ltd, Engineering Resources Ltd, Energy Services Centre Ltd, International Clean Energy Ltd, International Energy Service Centre Ltd and Projects Plus Ltd.

He was also legal consultant to the Office of the Prime Minister and given multiple direct orders.  He also served as legal consultant to Mater Dei hospital during Mizzi’s stint as Health Minister.

Prime Minister Robert Abela kept him as government consultant at the tourism ministry right up to at least 2022.

At the same time, Mifsud Bonnici was the GWU legal adviser.  He also held directorships on several GWU companies, including GWU Holdings Ltd, Inews Malta Ltd, Union Print Co Ltd and Untours Insurance Agency Ltd.

If you think Mifsud Bonnici did all this work out of the goodness of his heart you would be mistaken.

As early as 2016, while acting as Board Secretary at ARMS Ltd, Mifsud Bonnici’s legal firm was given a €60,000 euro direct order.  When Joseph Muscat was confronted about this glaring irregularity, he refused to comment.

Muscat kept defending Mifsud Bonnici.  He even took him with him to Singapore to see off the corruption-tainted LNG tanker. When Muscat was asked why, he simply retorted that Mifsud Bonnici was there as the legal consultant to Mizzi. Why did a government minister need to take his personal defence lawyer on government work trips?

Meanwhile, while Mifsud Bonnici was ARMS Board Secretary,  ARMS leased office space from the GWU, in which he had vested interests, for €62,000 per year.  The NAO found this deal breached public contract rules and recommended that the c start legal proceedings against the GWU.

Yet Labour dropped legal action against the Union. It even passed a parliamentary resolution amending the lease agreement for the GWU Valletta headquarters, calling the Opposition vindictive for demanding that the Attorney General’s advice be followed.

By September 2020, it was revealed that Mifsud Bonnici had been awarded €299,100 in direct contracts and orders between July 2016 and 2019 from Projects Malta, where he was director and later Board secretary. Labour attempted to conceal those payments.  Although legally obliged to publish those direct orders within six months, they were only published in 2020.  Mifsud Bonnici had to be protected.

Meanwhile, Mifsud Bonnici was raking in tens of thousands more out of the GWU jobless scheme funded by the taxpayer. Mifsud Bonnici made €380,000 between 2018 and 2021 off that devious scheme meant to help long-term unemployed gain employment. The GWU was meant to run that scheme through a “non-profit foundation”, but instead it subcontracted Mifsud Bonnici’s District Operations Ltd via another of his companies called District One, making him a sackload of cash.

But Mifsud Bonnici has much more to answer for. His name featured prominently in the NAO investigations on the fraudulent hospitals’ deal.  He sat on the steering committee that oversaw the whole scam from negotiations to project management.

He was Board secretary to the evaluations committee that recommended the company for the tender, and sat on the committee that negotiated the concession and also formed part of the steering committee that oversaw the process.  He faces charges of fraud and criminal association over his involvement in the Vitals/Steward Hospitals scandal.

Despite the public exposure of Mifsud Bonnici’s lucrative earnings, it’s taken our justice system until now to charge Mifsud Bonnici on the various scandals.  And even now, he’s still being protected.

When the police started their investigations into Mifsud Bonnici’s financial transactions, they realised that somebody had informed Mifsud Bonnici.  The police testified in court that they suspected there must have been a leak of sensitive information to him.

All of a sudden, in 2023, he filed his tax return for 2015.  He made adjustments to his declarations for all of the other years in between.  He paid a huge amount of taxes in 2023.

In February 2025, Mifsud Bonnici was arrested.  When confronted about his Swiss bank account, he refused to reply to questions.  He was released three times on police bail.

Now that he’s finally been arraigned, his defence lawyer Gianella de Marco managed to obtain a ban on the publication of the amounts of money he held in various bank accounts and financial institutions.  What’s so special about Mifsud Bonnici that the many hundreds of thousands of euro he hoarded during his stint as Konrad Mizzi’s right-hand man should be concealed from the public?