The fuel companies that transferred millions to Darren Debono and Jeffrey Chetcuti’s businesses were not questioned by police during investigations, the court heard on Monday
Auditor Chris Baldacchino, currently facing money laundering charges, was granted bail days after being remanded in custody upon his arraignment.
Baldacchino is pleading not guilty to his involvement in the laundering of large amounts of money from alleged criminal activity by filtering them into the country’s commercial system through irregular means.
Last year, Chris Baldacchino and Associates was fined some €58,000 by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit for lax anti-money laundering controls that could have “possibly led the firm to be used and abused by money launderers to bypass checks that would otherwise have been carried out.”
During Baldacchino’s arraignment, Inspector Omar Caruana told the court that the auditor was first arrested in November and had been interrogated a number of times pending police investigations which had started in April 2020.
Investigations into the financial dealings of a couple suspected of laundering millions of euro still has to determine the illicit source of the allegedly laundered funds.
Gordon Debono and his wife Yvette have spent the past three weeks under preventive custody after pleading not guilty upon their arraignment on November 25. They were back in court on Wednesday afternoon for the first hearing of the compilation of evidence.
Yet, following lengthy testimony by prosecuting Inspector Omar Caruana about the nature of the investigations into voluminous financial data relating to the couple’s bank accounts as well as other documents recording property transfers, no specific ‘predicate offence’ could be identified.