Malta's eastern European prostitution ring had in the past depended heavily on a racket of pimps and immigration officials who would stamp visas for working girls against payment or sex, a former pimp has claimed in an interview.

"There was a lot going on with visa permits back then... (about five years ago). You'd have a guy in immigration or high up the ladder, you give him a little somethin' and a girl to spend the night with and then it (the visa for the prostitute) gets sorted... Money talks, my friend... Even Judas had a price, and he sold God," the pimp says in an interview with M magazine.

In 2004, in fact, two immigration police constables were arraigned and charged with trafficking in human beings for the purpose of prostitution.

A constable, now dismissed, had been sentenced to three years' imprisonment, fined €465 (Lm200) and interdicted.

The magazine, which is distributed with The Times on Saturday, carries the exclusive interview with Franky*, a 60-year-old pimp who specialised in prostituting foreign women for some 10 years before he retired.

The man specialised in the prostitution of eastern European women, known popularly as 'ir-Russi' (the Russians), even though only a portion of the women came from Russia as most are Ukrainian.

Referring to the charges, the police told The Sunday Times when asked to comment on Franky's claims, that they always acted immediately, when they received information of this nature.

"If your interviewee, or any member of the general public, would like to share any information about this matter with the police, even confidentially, he is more than welcome to do so," the police said.

The former pimp went on to explain that a successful effort had been made by the police around 2003, effectively smashing the prostitution ring which at the time operated unhindered.

"It all started going to the dogs then. The police started organising itself as a circle and they kept closing in," he said.

"Then it became a question of who you know... The ones who had a 'good horse' - really powerful people - just kept making that phone call when things got hot and carry on with what they're doing. As for the rest, those whose contacts got frightened and would not cooperate even with more money on the table, they ended up losing out... I was one of them."

While these well-connected pimps survived the shakedown, he claimed that a new phenomenon was developing in which many foreign prostitutes, particularly Asians, were coming to Malta on their own steam and working without a pimp.

The women, brought here from eastern Europe would be 'bought' or rather leased until their visa expired, often for less than €1,000 (Lm429). Once here, they would work, seeing several clients a day, often retaining less than 15 per cent of the money they earned.

The revelation comes just as Malta adopts the Council of Europe's convention against human trafficking.

The pimp insisted such women were rarely forcefully brought to Malta for prostitution purposes, even though he admitted that the sources of the ring were eastern European networks of organised crime, believed by several European NGOs to be behind a massive phenomenon of sex-slavery.

The UK Home Office, for instance, estimates that about 4,000 women are trafficked into Britain for prostitution against their will, while the figures issued by the International Organisation for Migration puts the amount of women trafficked into the EU in 1995 alone to a staggering 500,000.

* Names have been altered to protect the interviewee's anonymity.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.