Police Commissioner John Rizzo yesterday categorically denied that the police had instructed an official at the tobacco company Swedish Match not to say the truth with regard to a key witness in the Dalligate scandal.
“It has to be clarified, beyond any doubt, that no police officer involved in these investigations ever instructed anyone, including officials at Swedish Match, not to tell the truth about Gayle Kimberley or any other person involved in the investigation,” the police said.
The statement came in reaction to an article in MaltaToday yesterday, which amplified on a recorded conversation between Green MEP José Bové and Swedish Match executive Johann Gabrielsson, in which he said his company had been urged by EU anti-fraud agency OLAF officials to stick to a misleading version of events that wrongly placed Dr Kimberley in a meeting with former European Commissioner John Dalli in February.
At one point in the conversation, a female speaker is heard saying “the Maltese police” made a similar request. This is apparently a reference to a meeting that Maltese investigators, led by Mr Rizzo, had with Swedish Match officials in Brussels in December.
Questions sent to the police about the matter on Friday remained unanswered and the press office said the force would not be commenting due to pending investigations. However, in the statement yesterday, the police opted to reject the allegations, branding them “blatant lies”.
The OLAF probe led to Mr Dalli’s sacking after the anti-fraud agency had concluded there was “unambiguous circumstantial evidence” that he knew that his former canvasser, Silvio Zammit, had asked for €60 million in return for the lifting of a European ban on snus, a smokeless tobacco that can only be sold in Sweden under EU rules.
Mr Dalli accepted he had met Dr Kimberley on January 6, when she gave him a presentation of the arguments for lifting the ban, but denied meeting her again with Mr Zammit on February 10, when the first intimations of a willingness to lift the snus ban were supposedly made.
The disputed February 10 meeting is salient because Dr Kimberley had originally told Swedish Match Mr Dalli had “expressed clearly that the ban on snus was absurd” on that occasion and “he had the will, the arguments and the Commission’s support to lift the ban on snus” but it would be political suicide for him.
She later changed that version to say that she was reporting on what Mr Zammit had told her.
Both Mr Dalli and Mr Zammit consistently denied that they had discussed snus at that meeting.
Swedish Match clarified that OLAF had not actually instructed the company “to provide a false or misleading picture” but simply recommended that its executives stick to the facts as they knew them (as given to them by Dr Kimberley) in their public statements rather than speculate about the version of events uncovered by OLAF.
Sources close to the investigation said it was OLAF that uncovered the fact Dr Kimberley had wrongly told Swedish Match she was present at the second meeting with Mr Dalli.
“Even if they issued such advice, the point would not have been to mislead but simply for Swedish Match not to be discussing what the investigation had or had not uncovered. The key point is that by the time the matter reached the Malta police there was no doubt on the part of investigators that Mr Dalli did not meet Dr Kimberley at this second meeting. Everyone was attesting to this version of events: Dr Kimberley (who changed her version), Silvio Zammit and John Dalli, so there was no interest in confusing matters,” a source said.