A team of investigative journalists have found links between the lawyer and friend of ‘Mystery Professor’ Joseph Mifsud and a senior Russian lawyer who advised the Kremlin.
Forensic News has also reported that Stephan Roh, who is based in Switzerland, set up a Delaware company in March 2016, a few months before the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. Delaware is effectively an ‘off-shore’ jurisdiction within the US affording company owners that are not resident there, effective tax avoidance.
Weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory Joseph Mifsud and Stephan Roh were speaking at a conference chaired by former Italian Foreign Minister Vincenzo Scotti in Rome that included former Russian government official Alexey Klishin.
Forensic News reported that Alexey Klishin, a lawyer who served as a Russian senator from 2005-2009, has been pictured with Joseph Mifsud and Stephan Roh at events multiple times in 2016 and 2017. For example, in January 2016 Joseph Mifsud invited Alexey Klishin to speak at the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD), of which Joseph Mifsud was Director. George Papadopoulos would go on to work for Joseph Mifsud 6 short weeks later. Near the end of 2016, George Papadopoulos’s future wife, Simona Mangiante, also worked for Joseph Mifsud.
George Papadopoulos would then inform the Donald Trump Campaign that through his contact with Joseph Mifsud he could supply “dirt” on Democratic Party candidate Hilary Clinton that the Russian government had obtained from her emails.
A chain of company documents from the UK, Ireland, Cyprus and Russia unveiled by the investigative journalists’ website shows a possible connection between a nuclear project Stephan Roh was involved in and Alexey Klishin.
The revelations by Forensic News shed new light on the connections between Joseph Mifsud, who is reportedly in hiding in Rome, and the Russian authorities. Stephan Roh has recently suggested that his client, Joseph Mifsud, was actually a ‘western intelligence operative’.
Right-wing media in the United States jumped on this suggestion using it to accuse Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of “lying”. It is politically convenient for the American right to believe that Joseph Mifsud acted in the interests of the then Democrat-controlled US government to ‘frame’ the Donald Trump campaign, rather than that the Joseph Mifsud connection is evidence of Russian meddling in the US elections.
Before he hit the world’s headlines as a possible spy and agent for Russia, Joseph Mifsud ran the ‘Link Campus’ in Rome that until the University of Malta severed its ties with that institution had been a branch of Malta’s University where Joseph Mifsud had been an academic. For a number of years, he also served as Head of Secretariat for Malta’s Foreign Minister Michael Frendo.
He was last seen in public in Malta alongside then Leader of Opposition Joseph Muscat days before the 2013 election announcing an educational project that never materialised.