MFSP, the investment management company that handled large deposits from Keith Schembri without checking where he got the money from appears to be managing the risk it may be forced to close down.

It has already been punished significantly by the anti-money laundering agency, the FIAU, who has imposed fines on MFSP though, interestingly, not on its clients.

A few weeks ago MFSP was fined by the FIAU €38,750 for breaching money laundering laws. That’s not the end of the agency’s troubles. The financial arbiter who rules on customer complaints has fielded several complaints by MFSP clients accusing it of negligence costing them significant sums.

Apparently, to shield for the risk of closure of the investment business, surviving MFSP directors Matthew Pace and Lorraine Falzon have set up, together with non-executive director William van Buren, Zenith Life Limited, a life insurance company intended to take from MFSP Financial Management Limited its life insurance business.

Separating life insurance from the investment income business ensures that should the investment income operation be shut down by regulatory action, the insurance business can continue to survive.

Significantly MFSP Financial Management Limited already possesses a life insurance operator license which strongly indicates that for the same owners to set up a new life insurance company, their motivation is likely the transfer of that business to the new entity.

Matthew Pace has led the break-up of MFSP from his former founding partners after the investment company took on the business of Keith Schembri and other Labour cronies such as Deo Scerri, now CEO of the Bank of Valletta, Panama Gangsters Brian Tonna, Adrian Hillman and Keith Schembri’s business partner and front man Malcolm Scerri and other sundries like Robert Musumeci. 

The handling of these accounts has landed MFSP in hot water for its demonstrably superficial administration of anti-money laundering rules particularly in the case of Keith Schembri’s deposits.

Keith Schembri received considerable sums including deposits amounting to around $400,000 five weeks after meeting the president of notoriously corrupt Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.

These funds along with other disbursements from his off-shore hideouts in the British Virgin Islands were eventually deposited in a client account held by MFSP for Keith Schembri at the Bank of Valletta.