The last time Andreas Gerdes saw his 31-month old daughter, she was being pushed in a stroller outside Giorgio’s Café in Sliema by her mother, Anika De Vilera.

As Mr Gerdes approached the stroller to speak to his daughter, Ms De Vilera yanked it away forcefully and strode to the police station in Sliema where she filed a report that Mr Gerdes had violently lashed out at her. The police prosecuted Mr Gerdes.

It was the third time that charges were pressed at the behest of Ms De Vilera. (All three prosecutions were eventually dismissed by the court.)

At the time Ms De Vilera was under a court order to pay back €80,000 she had borrowed from a friend. She was also being pursued by other companies in Malta for non-payment for services and a string of criminal complaints had been lodged against her, including an allegation of abuse and enslavement by her nanny reported by the Times of Malta. Previous to that, Ms De Vilera had been convicted three times for fraud in Germany where she was handed a suspended sentence.

About six weeks after the Sliema encounter, on January 10, 2017, she spirited the couple’s daughter Amelia (not her real name) out of Malta in a case defined by social services as child abduction.

The little girl was first taken by ferry to Sicily and then onwards to Croatia, her mother’s country of origin – and the well-to-do Mr Gerdes has spent the past 14 months fixated on bringing his daughter back home to Malta.

He has also spent more than a hundred thousand euros on a team of lawyers in Malta and Croatia, as well on as a British investigator who has had at his disposal a team of local investigators.

Mr Gerdes has since instituted four court cases in his wide-ranging court battles to restore his daughter to his home, three in Valletta and one in Zagreb, where he came face to face with Ms De Vilera at the first hearing last Friday.

At the beginning of this year he had tracked his daughter down to kindergarten at the Little Heart Montessori School in Zagreb. He visited the school and spoke to the principal and teacher about Amelia’s needs, including her medical complication (hydrocephalus) that has already led to brain surgery twice.

I asked if he had made any attempts to see or speak to Amelia at the school.

“No,” he answered, “that might not be good for her stability. But I am in regular contact with the school and doctors to ensure Amelia gets the care needed.”

For the past six months he has lived in between Marsaxlokk and Zagreb, where he has “set up a place for Amelia to be there”.

Being on the case has become an all-consuming struggle. For the past 10 months that I have worked on this story he has inundated me with documents and messages and rants. I could compare him to Amelia’s guardian angel, an invisible protective force watching over her, without speaking to her or touching her for the past 14 months.

“I can make a difference in her life,” he told me recently as way of justification.

This 51-year-old German national, who made his money from investing in innovative communications and digital companies (nowadays he “invests time and money in worthy causes”), first came to Malta on holiday for 10 days in 1995. He liked Malta and bought a large sprawling house set in vast grounds at Marsaxlokk, his main base ever since.

I can make a difference in her life

He fathered his first daughter, 5, to a German woman who lives in Gozo. Now separated, they maintain a cooperative, equitable parenting arrangement. “We never needed a lawyer,” Mr Gerdes said, “and we will never need to speak to one.”

It has been an altogether different story with Amelia, born on August 31, 2015. An atmosphere of cooperation between mother and father reigned in the first few weeks. But a chill set in after two months when the infant was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, necessitating surgery, and the mother, unbeknown to Mr Gerdes, secretly registered her estranged Venezuelan husband as the father, with whom she was still technically married.

The parents eventually reached a private agreement on the child’s care and custody, and throughout 2016 Amelia lived with Mr Gerdes mostly. In around May or June of 2016, Ms De Vilera did not seek her daughter for about 11 weeks, he said. “Then she resurfaced in July.”

This was at a time when Ms De Vilera began to gain infamy for her extravagant lifestyle (in May of that year five neighbours reported her to the police after a late-night lavish party she threw at her posh place in Sliema) after failing to pay for expenses she had been incurring for things such as renting a yacht. Reports of fraud also began to emerge, cases were filed in the civil court and criminal complaints made to the police.

This was consistent with the persona depicted in a report filed at a court in Germany 10 years ago. The court in Neuss had tasked the psychiatrist to assess Ms De Vilera’s criminal liability for fraud, especially in light of her hospitalisation for depression.

The psychiatrist wrote that Ms De Vilera has “high IQ”, “above-average intellect”, and “suffers from histrionic personality disorder with anti-social and paranoid tendencies”. The psychiatrist commented that women who possess these traits can be charming, flirtatious and provocative.

“Being a mistress of the first impression,” wrote the psychiatrist, “they often know how to sell themselves well.”

Eventually, in December of 2016, Ms De Vilera sent Mr Gerdes an e-mail asking for Amelia to be with her in Malta over the Christmas period and inviting the father and his first daughter to spend the holidays with them. She wrote: “I think it’s time that my children start spending time with me, their mother, and that happiness and harmony start being part of their daily life.”

On December 22, the police went to Mr Gerdes’ house and Mr Gerdes handed the girl over to her mother in their presence. The agreement was that Amelia be returned to her father’s house, where she had been living, on January 2. Yet the mother never complied – and Mr Gerdes could do nothing legally about it.

“Afterwards,” he recounted, “I took to going to her flat to ask to see my daughter. But she reported me to the police for harassing her, and I was charged in court for harassment.”

Then there was that encounter outside Giorgio’s Café, the last time Mr Gerdes saw his daughter. Ms De Vilera made five police reports against Mr Gerdes in January and February of 2017 – three for harassment, one for attacking her, and another for sending e-mails about her to online gaming companies.

This manic chain of events culminated on February 20, 2017, when Ms De Vilera spirited Amelia out of Malta on a passport procured on the false premise that the original had been stolen.

Mr Gerdes has now been sucked into a legal morass. He was eventually listed officially as the father after a court-ordered DNA test, on July 5, 2017, but bringing Amelia back home now depends on the multiple cases working their way through the court in Valletta and Zagreb.

Was the removal child abduction?

When Andreas Gerdes made a report to the police that his daughter Amelia had been abducted by her mother, the police refused to coordinate their response with him because he was not officially listed as the father. The default father was the mother’s estranged Venezuelan husband (Mr Gerdes was eventually listed as the father on July 5.)

Moreover, the police did not strictly define Amelia’s removal from Malta to Croatia as criminal child abduction. There is the little detail that the child, having acquired the nationality of her mother at birth, is a Croatian taken to Croatia by her Croatian mother.

Except that, this little detail aside, the sequence and the story gets very complicated. The day after the police oversaw the handover of Amelia from the father to the mother, on December 23, 2016, Mr Gerdes was filing a prohibitory injunction to bar his daughter from leaving Malta while Ms De Vilera was at the Sliema police station making a report that Amelia’s passport had been stolen (the passport was in Mr Gerdes’ house).

Yet Mr Gerdes’ injunction was not brought into force because Ms De Vilera couldn’t be found by the court officials to be notified.

Fast forward to February 1, 2017, and the police swooped on Mr Gerdes’ house to seize the passport that had been reported stolen. Mr Gerdes informed the police that he had handed it over to his lawyer, Joseph Mizzi, who in turn deposited it in court two days later.

Three days after that, on February 6, Ms De Vilera was photographed in Zagreb brandishing Amelia’s new or replacement passport, which she had procured on the basis that the original had been stolen (when in fact it was at the Maltese Family Court). Then she used the replacement passport to slip out of Malta with her daughter.

More than a year has now passed and, when I asked the police why they haven’t mounted an attempt to bring Amelia back to Malta, a spokesperson replied that this case is a “civil matter.”

“The Police have no authority to even attempt to bring the minor or the mother back to Malta since there are no breaches of Maltese criminal law involved.”

The explanation offered by the police is that at the time that Amelia was taken out of Malta the prohibitory injunction was not in force. Mr Gerdes’ lawyer had tried to get around this by filing a legal application on March 15, 2017 in which he requested that the injunction be applied retroactively from the date of original application. The court acceded to this request, making Amelia’s removal from Malta a retroactive breach of the prohibitive injunction.

“It must be noted,” the police spokesperson told me in relation to this point, “that by the time the injunction was already in place, Anika De Vilera had already departed Malta.”

Here we enter into legalistic arguments: that any act cannot be redefined as a crime retroactively in criminal jurisprudence, and a lawyer could additionally argue that Ms De Vilera’s action lacked criminal intent because she wasn’t notified of the injunction.

But had criminal intent been present when Ms De Vilera reported her daughter’s passport stolen at a time when she was aware that the father had the passport? I asked the police whether criminal liability could be established in this sense, and whether the police were empowered to issue charges against Ms De Vilera for the false report.

The spokesperson replied that the stolen passport report “partially concerned the fact that the minor’s passport had been taken by Andreas Gerdes who at the time was not recognised as the father”.

He added: “He was officially a stranger to the girl and that statement, given the context of events at the time it was made, definitely does not amount to lodging a false police report. In our line of work we base ourselves on evidence and not on assumptions especially when there is a small girl and two feuding parents with one of them at the time of the report not having either a legal or confirmed biological tie to the girl.”

What the police spokesperson didn’t say is that the day before the stolen-passport report was made, the police had gone to the house of the man who was “officially a stranger to the girl” and oversaw the handover of his daughter to Ms De Vilera, and, when asked about her passport that same evening, Mr Gerdes claims to have told the police he would look for the passport in his home. Moreover, the police then again went to the house of the stranger to the girl a few weeks later to seize the passport.

“The larger question,” Dr Mizzi told me, “is why the police or any other authority didn’t decide to bring Amelia back to Malta. Granted, Andreas was not officially listed as the father, and Anika had not been officially notified of the injunction. But the police were aware that Andreas was indeed the father, and that she had been living with him at his residence.

“We then had the paternity judgment in July, and the police are aware of the history of Anika. So why didn’t the police do something to bring a child who has a medical complication back to Malta?”

Dr Mizzi has now filed a “challenge in court to order the police to institute criminal proceedings against Ms De Vilera for child abduction”.

Meanwhile, six weeks ago Mr Gerdes’ lawyers in Croatia also separately filed an application with the Central Authority in Croatia requesting that Amelia be repatriated to Malta in terms of the terms of the Hague Convention.

That case is moving swiftly through the court in Zagreb. After the first hearing last Friday, the court will reconvene tomorrow to hear the testimony of the parents, and the indication is that the judge will move expeditiously to hand down a ruling returning Amelia to her ‘habitual residence’ in her father’s house in Marsaxlokk.

How report of ‘stolen’ passport was used to take little girl out of Malta

December 22, 2016

The police go to Mr Gerdes’ house and he agrees to hand over the child to her mother for the holidays until January 2. Handover takes place at Marsaxlokk police station. The inspector asks Mr Gerdes for the girl’s passport and he claims to have replied that he would look for it in his house.

December 23, 2016

Anika De Vilera makes a report at the Sliema police station that her daughter’s passport has been stolen; Mr Gerdes files a prohibitory injunction at the Family Court to prevent the child’s removal from Malta.

January 2, 2017

Ms De Vilera goes back on her promise and fails to return their child to the father’s home, where the girl had lived for many months.

January 10, 2017

Mr Gerdes approaches his daughter in Sliema. The mother goes to the police station and reports that he hit her (the police prosecute Mr Gerdes and he is eventually acquitted).

February 1, 2017

The police go to Mr Gerdes’ house for the girl’s passport and he informs them that it is at his lawyer’s office, Joseph Mizzi.

February 3, 2017

Dr Mizzi deposits the passport at the Family Court where it remains up to this day.

February 6, 2017

In Zagreb Ms De Vilera gets a new passport for her daughter on the basis of the stolen-passport report issued by the police in Malta on December 23.

February 20, 2017

Ms De Vilera spirits the girl out of Malta via ferry to Sicily using the passport she had procured in Croatia on February 6, while the original passport was at the court for safe-keeping.

The Sunday Times of Malta asked the police for a copy of the stolen-passport report for reference only. The police replied that “copies of Police reports cannot be given to third parties”. They did not answer the question about the identity of the officer who took down or authored the stolen-passport report at the Sliema police station.