By Dan Byrne for AMLi
TEN PEOPLE have been arrested, including two former footballers, as part of a massive crackdown by Maltese authorities on an international fuel smuggling ring.
Law enforcement in the country confirmed that the arrests had been made over several raids Monday night and Tuesday morning – targeting individuals believed to be linked to the ring.
Those arrested included two former Maltese soccer international players Jeffrey Chetcuti and Darren Debono.
Having been denied bail Monday, both men spent the night in police custody and have since been charged with money laundering and smuggling offences, the Times of Malta reports.
Two other white-collar workers – one lawyer and one accountant – are also among those arrested. It’s understood that the two were interrogated by police Tuesday on suspected links to money laundering activity.
The accountant’s firm had previously been fined almost €59,000 in October of this year for lax anti-money laundering controls that Malta’s financial watchdog said could have “led the firm to be used and abused by money launderers.”
That fine was related to a probe into the same fuel smuggling ring, which has been a target for authorities and investigators for some time.
The operation was found to have involved illegal movements of fuel worth tens of millions of euro. Ties with the Italian mafia and Libyan armed groups have also been reported.
Understood to have begun operations after the downfall of former Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi in 2011, the ring avoided Maltese jurisdiction by moving fuel along routes that narrowly avoided the borders of Maltese waters – thereby avoiding Maltese law.
A collaboration of Italian investigative journalists – alongside the Times of Malta – were the people who originally brought the scheme into the public eye, through a combination of police files, corporate and marine data, UN reports and interviews.
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