Adrian Hillman arrives in Malta to face money-laundering, graft charges

Adrian Hillman arrived back in Malta on Friday afternoon after being extradited from the UK to face money-laundering and graft charges.

The former Allied Newspapers managing director was immediately taken to the Financial Crimes Investigation Department for police interrogation.

He is expected to be charged in the coming days.

Hillman and former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri were the subject of a four-year magisterial inquiry into suspicious payments that passed between the pair.

Schembri was charged in March together with his business associates, financial advisers Nexia BT and Zenith Finance, formerly MFSP, on a slew of criminal charges.

Vincent Buhagiar, who was chairman of Progress Press at the time of the major printing investment that sparked the investigation, has also been charged with having received backhanders from Schembri and laundering those illicit funds.

Hillman was not among those charged, as the authorities had to deal with a two-month process to repatriate him from the UK where he was studying.

According to a leaked Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit report, Schembri allegedly filtered over €650,000 to Hillman in over 30 “suspicious transactions” between 2011 and 2015.

Hillman was also found to have deposited €225,000 in cash into his HSBC account between January 2011 and February 2016.

The allegations of financial crime surrounding the two were first reported by Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2016.

Hillman went on garden leave from Allied Newspapers and the company severed all ties with him shortly afterwards.

In May 2017, Simon Busuttil presented then magistrate, now judge, Aaron Bugeja with documents on suspicious transactions from Schembri to Hillman, who at the time was at the helm of the company that publishes Times of Malta.