When you’re one of the accused in a case which involves enough evidence to fill up a hall, your lawyers are going to need to rely on one strategy: attacking the evidence-gathering process, along with the evidence itself
Attacking evidence
Fortunately, liars are usually found out, and unless there are any cardinal errors committed by the prosecution, in the case of the hospitals concession, liars don’t have much room to manouevre in.
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In today’s hearing in the case of the Republic of Malta v disgraced former health minister Chris Fearne and his former colleagues and associates, we saw plenty of angry posturing about how evidence was gathered in the magisterial inquiry – the same one that led to an avalanche of charges being pressed against Fearne and over thirty other persons who were involved in the hospitals concession.
During the testimony of former FCID police inspector George Frendo, we heard the former police officer describe how he was in charge of executing the search warrants in the offices of the legal firm DF Consultancy Ltd. The shareholders of this company are three of the accused in this case – Jean-Carl Farrugia, Kenneth Deguara, and Kevin Deguara.
Several members of the police corps already testified about how these searches were carried out using a list of keywords which inquiring magistrate Gabriella Vella had asked them to use. Today, Frendo said the same thing, though defence lawyers insisted on a specific point this time around.
On behalf of his clients DF Consultancy Ltd, defence lawyer Franco Debono accused the witness of breaking the law when carrying out these searches. Though the search warrant named DF Consultancy Ltd specifically, the police force seized documents bearing DF Advocates’ logo, a separate company whose address is listed at the same address and is owned by the same individuals.
Specifically, the alleged breach of the law occurred on two counts – the fact that legally confidential material is excluded from search warrants and the claim that these individuals were not aware they were being considered as suspects by the police when the search warrants were executed.
After a lot of theatrics, the defence formally asked the court to expunge all the evidence that was gathered from DF Consultancy’s office – basically, removing it from the xase entirely. The prosecution objected by arguing that since we are still in the prima facie phase, and that therefore, this court’s sole purpose is to gather evidence.
On this, magistrate Leonard Caruana will be making a decision at a later stage.
We also heard a lot about how the court’s experts were appointed to assist with the inquiry, another familiar theme that was mentioned towards the beginning of the case. Today, the defence insisted on knowing how these experts were appointed and how they were paid for their work. We will learn more about this tomorrow.
We cannot exclude the important testimony of one of the former members of the government’s negotiation committee, RSM Ltd shareholder George Gregory. This was one of the committees which effectively approved the awarding of the hospitals concession to VGH.
Gregory, who was also appointed to the steering committee by Projects Malta, stated that none of the committees he was on carried out any kind of due diligence about the ultimate beneficial owners of VGH, where the financing they claimed to have came from, and that he does not remember too many details about the process beyond the instructions they were asked to follow as committee members.
To get all the details about today’s hearing, don’t forget that you can access our live blogs on NEWZ.mt.
Read today’s Live Blog
Next Live Blog: Wednesday, 17 July, 9.30am
