Who is Mifsud? 
It was an unusually warm day in the seaside town of Portoroz, and Leida Ruvina was growing suspicious. The doctoral program she had been enrolled in for weeks had all the signs of a sham—the campus was a small, shabby building rented out from a tourist school and the French translation for “Euro-Mediterranean” in the university’s seal was misspelled.
Ruvina raised her hand to ask the university’s president what was going on, and he assured her that everything was in order. He then complimented her on her fluent English and offered to advise her on her dissertation thesis. “If you want, I can be your mentor,” she recalled him telling her in an awkward exchange as he steered the conversation away from questions about the university’s legitimacy.
The Ph.D. program, part of an EU-led initiative to revitalize the former Yugoslav nation of Slovenia, was led by a short but stout Maltese professor with greying hair and an affinity for exaggerating his credentials. The man was Joseph Mifsud, a name as hard to forget as it was to pronounce for many of the students and peers he left a rather unflattering impression on in his time serving as the school’s president.
In 2008, rather surprisingly in view of his lackluster academic record, Mifsud became president of the Euro-Mediterranean University (Emuni)—unanimously elected by its general assembly. Based in Slovenia, Emuni was a product of international cooperation aimed at providing political inroads for NATO and the EU into former Soviet states. It had been formed under the direction of the intergovernmental Union for the Mediterranean and co-founded by four existing universities: the University of Haifa in Israel, the University of Maribor in Slovenia, the University of Sousse in Tunisia and the University of Urbino in Italy.
Mifsud was a mediocre academic whose true passion was socializing with influential figures, so the idea of international collaboration among universities clearly appealed to his ambitions. While not a position of any meaningful status, it gave him plenty of opportunities to travel the world making speeches, signing partnership agreements with foreign officials and generally being treated as an important person.
Judging by remarks made by his former students and colleagues, he was not a particularly inspiring speaker and he was far from noteworthy in his field. Many of those who crossed paths with him were left entirely unimpressed by his character and his academic prowess.
Matthew Caruana Galizia, the son of slain investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, was one of 15 participants at a 2006 class taught by taught by Mifsud. Galizia said the professor fumbled through his lecture and seemed to have “no idea what he was talking about.”
“He spent the whole time trying to impress us and was coming off as a complete charlatan,” Galizia said. One of Mifsud’s former coworkers at the university said he was a name-dropping networker focused on sourcing donations from wealthy foreigners and taking luxurious work trips abroad at the university’s expense.
“He was hooked on travel,” said Joseph Grech, a fellow educator who described working for Mifsud as “the most stressful experience of my life.” Grech called his former boss a “hawwadi,” a Maltese term which roughly translates to “intriguer.”
Although the university was legitimate, the Ph.D. program was bogus, and Mifsud would soon be caught up in a scandal as Slovenian officials attempted to salvage the remnants of the Euro- Mediterranean university while its former president fled the country to escape prosecution.
Emuni said Mifsud owed €39,332 ($42,677) for fraudulent expenses, mobile phone “over- usage” and penalties regarding “non-compliance.” According to an audit report, he had managed to run up a mobile phone bill of €13,767 during one financial year, when the university’s budget was only €3,600.
An auditor from PricewaterhouseCoopers was brought in to make sense of the university’s financial woes, writing Mifsud a series of emails and letters asking how the money had been spent. Mifsud, who had gone on loan to Malta’s Foreign Office, didn’t return repeated messages from the auditor requesting clarification. Eventually, the university and PricewaterhouseCoopers both lost patience with the missing academic’s lack of response and wrote to him on Nov. 15, 2007, threatening to fire him and pursue legal action.
It was only then that Mifsud finally responded — to tell the university he was quitting in lieu of a new opportunity abroad. Mifsud later dismissed these allegations as a “non-issue” stirred up by political foes in Malta. The fact that he narrowly escaped criminal prosecution by fleeing the country immediately after the audit was conducted doesn’t seem to support his assertion.
Emuni officials discussed flagging Mifsud to OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, according to an email seen by the AP. Abdelhamid Eizoheiry, the president who filled Mifsud’s abandoned post, said the management board eventually decided that it wasn’t worth pursuing Mifsud in court.
“We would have spent much more than 30,000 euros in legal fees,” Eizoheiry said.
Leida eventually got a refund for the time she spent at the university in 2012 and began her dissertation elsewhere. Mifsud has since become the central person of interest in the Trump- Russia probe, an international man of intrigue purported to be either an asset for Russia or Western intelligence, depending on which side of the aisle the claim is being made from. But who is Joseph Mifsud, and how did a jet-setting con artist set off one of the greatest election meddling allegations in US history?
Mifsud’s Connection to the U.S.
As the presidential election warms up amidst the backdrop of a struggling economy and a middle-class America frustrated over rising costs for, well, everything, the White House administration has grown desperate in the face of surveys that continue to show the incumbent president’s popularity among his own base is in freefall.
Following Biden’s abysmal performance in a debate against Trump that was carefully designed to favor the incumbent, Democrats are scrambling to prevent an inevitable defeat they see as an existential threat. They’re throwing every accusation they can at Trump, hoping for something to stick.
After his conviction in a NY state court failed to have the devastating effect in the polls that Biden’s campaign staff had hoped for, they fell back on the same playbook they used in the previous election, buying millions of dollars’ worth of ads and text message campaigns to remind the American public about Trump’s ties to alleged election meddling by Russia.
But these same ads and unsolicited spam texts fail to mention one Siberia-sized hole in the narrative they’re pushing. That is the credibility of the man who was both the source of the initial allegations and the supposed intermediary between Trump’s campaign staff and the Russian government. So why exactly did the FBI launch an investigation into former president Donald Trump based on the word of an education reform professor with a checkered history involving embezzlement and fraud?
These are questions several members of Congress, including US Rep. Thomas Massie and Rep. Matt Gaetz, have been pressing for answers to from special counsel John Durham, who investigated potential government wrongdoing in the early days of the Trump-Russia probe.
In 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr tapped Durham to look into the original basis for the Trump-Russia probe for signs of government misconduct. Durham’s 300-page report was sharply critical of the bureau, but it did not refute the underlying findings of what would later become special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The report referred to the FBI’s basis for starting its investigation as “seriously flawed,” and said agents showed clear signs of confirmation bias in their approach to Trump’s campaign staff,
noting “serious errors” in the FBI’s application for a wiretap on former Trump campaign aide Carter Paige.
But after four years and over $6.5 million in taxpayer funding for his investigation, Durham had failed to locate the single most important piece of the puzzle, the man who was the catalyst for the Russia probe from the start, Joseph Mifsud.
When Mifsud’s name first surfaced – referred to as “Foreign Contact 1” – in U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in 2016, Mifsud vehemently denied ever discussing emails and Russian hacking with former Trump campaign staff member George Papadopoulos or having any connection to Russia at all. Mifsud described Papadopoulos’ claim that he knew about Russia’s material on Clinton as “baloney.” Mifsud has since laid low, very low. He disappeared for nearly a year, leading many to speculate he might be dead.
Mifsud’s lawyer, a Swiss-German named Stephan Roh, and another man with a less than reputable history, has assured journalists and government officials that Mifsud is alive and well, but forced to stay in hiding because of “someone’s decision” as the elusive person of interest said in a message relayed by Roh.
The mystery surrounding Mifsud’s whereabouts has invited more than a few conspiracy theories, some of them nurtured by Roh himself. Never one to let a good scandal go to waste, Roh co-wrote and self-published a 284-page book speculating that both Mifsud and Papadopoulos were scapegoats, mere “pawns” employed by the Western intelligence community and had been tricked into what Roh theorized as a conspiracy to discredit Trump by alleging that his campaign had coordinated with Russian intelligence.
Mifsud is hiding “under instruction of the intelligence agencies,” Roh stated, claiming that a network of Western spies were trying to intimidate Mifsud to keep him quiet. In reality, Mifsud’s vanishing act is par for the course after nearly two decades of disappearing from one country to the next to avoid being held accountable for his various crimes in Italy, Slovenia, Malta and the UK. In fact, the Italian secret service have been trying to catch up to him since 2017 in response to yet another scandal he’s associated with involving his lawyer and a fugitive politician.
What do a disgraced Maltese academic, a disreputable Swiss lawyer, and a fugitive Kazakh oligarch have to do with each other? Quite a bit, apparently, according to a report by BuzzFeed, which just goes to show that while international corruption is tremendously complex, the cast of characters is shockingly small and amusingly cliche.
A BuzzFeed investigation published in 2020 revealed Roh had ties to a shady Khazakh businessman named Mukhtar Ablyazov. Per BuzzFeed’s article: “Reported here for the first time, the apparent link to Ablyazov — a business tycoon who has often been likened to Bernie Madoff, the former financier who ran a massive Ponzi scheme — is a further twist, showing Roh
entangled in a massive and complex money laundering case. The material seen by BuzzFeed News shows that over several years, Roh and his legal and business partners were used to move assets and funds that, according to BTA Bank, ultimately belonged to Ablyazov and his close associates.”
Roh vehemently denied the accusations, reportedly going so far as to threaten legal action against BuzzFeed News, while labelling their investigative journalist a “British spy.” He never followed through with his threats, choosing to avoid the spotlight as the criminal proceedings gathered more media attention.
For those unfamiliar with Central Asian politics, Ablyazov is a controversial figure. At the time of the report, he was wanted in multiple countries on a plethora of charges but managed to reinvent himself as a revolutionary leader being slandered by his incumbent political opponent. This proved difficult for anyone trying to determine the validity of the accusations: were Kazakh authorities pursuing charges against him because of corruption, or was Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, going after him because he was a potential political threat? Or could it be both?
Perhaps there is a bit of truth to each theory, but a 2022 conviction in a Moscow criminal court certainly lends credence to the accusations outlined in BuzzFeed’s report. A Russian court sentenced former head of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank to 15 years in prison in absentia on the very embezzlement charges Roh was accused of helping facilitate. The Moscow Tagansky District Court handed down the sentence after finding him guilty in a criminal case regarding the alleged embezzlement of 58 billion rubles ($790 million) between 2006 and 2009.
The sentence was handed down just days after the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of BTA Bank in its own case against Ablyazov, awarding BTA bank compensation in the amount of $218 million. Roh, for his part, managed to evade prosecution in both trials, though his name was referenced several times in each. It pays to have friends in high places.
Mifsud has his own shady Kazakhstan connection. In 2015, he was one of 858 international observers of the nation’s presidential election. An election which Nursultan Nazarbayev won by an astounding 97.7 percent of the vote. To address rumors that the poll might have been rigged, Mifsud assured voters and the media that no such thing could have occurred under his oversight, saying the officials who counted the votes had “met all the standards” and the outcome was “like a holiday for the people.”
With so much evidence coming to light painting the person who had first tipped off Papadopoulos that the Russian’s “had some dirt” on Hillary due to hacking the DNC’s emails as a charlatan and a liar, Gaetz and Massie were justifiably dumbfounded that this was the man
whose meetings with Papadopoulos served as the impetus for the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign. It was during one of these meetings where Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to Olga Vinogradova, a woman he falsely claimed was Putin’s niece in order to convince the campaign staffers he was well-connected. Vinogradova ended up having no relation to Putin, unsurprisingly.
Durham, for his part, came off as a man who either genuinely believed the FBI had done a thorough job of investigating Mifsud, or simply didn’t want to admit what seemed apparent under questioning by Gaetz and Massie, that the bureau had made itself look incompetent in their handling of the probe from start to finish.
Bringing up the fact that several of Mifsud’s statements during an FBI interview in 2017 had been proven to be false, Massie and Gaetz asked Durham why Mifsud hadn’t been located and arrested for lying to Federal investigators. Durham, visibly flustered, responded by explaining that he and Barr had travelled to Italy looking for Mifsud, but hadn’t been able to locate him.
In 2019, nearly two years to the day he vanished, three Italian news outlets — La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, and Adnkronos — received an audio recording out of the blue from someone claiming to be Mifsud. The voice in the recording categorically denied any wrongdoing and claimed to have no connection to any intelligence agencies, either Western or otherwise. He repeatedly insisted that he was just a “networker” who brought people together for mutual benefit.
“I tried to do nothing else except as I have always done, put A in contact with B, B in contact with C, for purely academic purposes,” the man said in surprisingly fluent English.
Nobody has seen or heard from Mifsud since 2017, when his wallet and passport were found discarded in Portugal. While the FBI was looking all over Europe for the Maltese professor who allegedly delivered word of Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails to Trump’s campaign, his wallet and passport were left unclaimed for 17 months in a lost-and-found office in a Portuguese airport.
The items were found by municipal police in the idyllic coastal village of Câmara de Lobos on Madeira, a small island off the coast of Morocco that’s popular with tourists and Slavic oligarchs. Mifsud’s wallet and passport were found together on Aug. 5, 2017, some three months before he disappeared from public view and just six months after he was questioned by FBI officials investigating the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.
While Roh has repeatedly claimed to have contact with Mifsud, his “proof” has failed to convince investigators and many journalists covering the case have hypothesized that he was assassinated by either the Kremlin or Western intelligence. There is one theory that Roh, who has a Russian wife and Russian business ties, is utterly unwilling to entertain about Mifsud.
“He is certainly not a Russian spy,” Roh wrote in an email to the AP, in which he insisted that that any coverage by the outlet discussed Mifsud’s “clear and evidenced Western Intelligence role” and threatened immediate legal action if Mifsud were portrayed as “a Russian spy, asset, cut-out etc.”
Described as a “Russian agent” by former FBI director James Comey, the prosecution that led to Papadopoulos’ conviction sought to paint the professor as a man with direct ties to the Kremlin and the FSB. However, many of those who have interacted with Mifsud laugh at the notion that he could have ever been an intelligence asset of any kind.
People who knew him say Mifsud was always networking and often exaggerated his access to political officials. He has repeatedly denied knowing anyone in the Russian government yet had previously claimed to have had an exchange with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at an event and been good friends with President Putin, neither of which has any basis in truth as far as the evidence suggests.
On at least one occasion he was described at an international education conference as an ambassador, when he has, in fact, never held such a post. His resume claimed he has been a member of a French presidential panel called the “Comite du Risque” – but no such organization exists, the French Presidency told CNN.
Laris Gaiser, a Slovenian crisis consultant who was brought in to investigate Mifsud’s mishandling of funds at the Euro-Mediterranean University, said that going off the grid is Mifsud’s modus operandi. Gaiser said Mifsud was “too incompetent” to have had any connections with intelligence agencies, either Western or elsewhere.
“Disappearing for him is the most perfect way to survive,” Gaiser added, noting that Mifsud had escaped prosecution for his crimes in Slovenia only because it would have cost more in legal fees than it was worth to recover the 30,000 euros of “allegedly ineligible costs” he had swindled from the university.
“I do not believe he’s the real connection to any real scandal. I’m closer to Melania Trump than he is to Putin,” Gaiser added, referring to the former First Lady’s Slovenian background. “If they’re trying to impeach the most important president in the world with Mifsud, then they have nothing.”
We may never know what happened to Joseph Mifsud, but it seems quite clear that the top law enforcement agency in the most powerful nation on Earth is either willfully inept or woefully corrupt.
References:
European Parliament
20110126_3_cv_mifsud_en.pdf (europa.eu)
European Parliament
Union for the Mediterranean: time for parliaments to play their role | Topics | European Parliament (europa.eu)
ICIJ
‘It is still dangerous to be a journalist’: Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son reflects on her life and legacy – ICIJ
Times of Malta
‘Ineligible’ expenses academic in trouble (timesofmalta.com)
Associated Press
Documents Concerning Leida Ruvina – DocumentCloud
X/Representative Thomas Massie
Thomas Massie on X: “Who is Joseph Mifsud and why did the DOJ go from mentioning him 89 times to not mentioning him at all?” / X
NPR
Scathing Report Puts Secret FISA Court Into The Spotlight. Will Congress Act? : NPR
The Washington Post
Professor at center of Russia disclosures claimed to have met with Putin – The Washington Post
Bloomberg
DNC Lawyers Say Papadopoulos Contact Joseph Mifsud May Be Dead – Bloomberg
BuzzFeed
Joseph Mifsud: Lawyer Stephan Roh Is Entangled In One Of The World’s Biggest Fraud Cases (buzzfeednews.com)
Financial Times
Spies, lies and the oligarch: inside London’s booming secrets industry (ft.com)
Euro Money
The hunt for Mukhtar Ablyazov: Banker, criminal, fugitive, victim? | Euromoney
Radio Free Europe
Russia Sentences Fugitive Kazakh Banker Ablyazov In Absentia To 15 Years (rferl.org)
The Astana Times
US Court Recognizes Ablyazov Guilty of Money Laundering, Awards BTA Bank $218 Million – The Astana Times
The New York Times
Kazakhstan’s President Is Re-elected by Almost Every Voter – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Kazinform International News Agency
inform.kz/en/elections-in-kazakhstan-meet-all-eu-standards-joseph-mifsud_a2769945
Politico
Mysterious Putin ‘niece’ has a name – POLITICO
BuzzFeed
An Italian Newspaper Has Published An Audio Recording From Someone Claiming To Be Joseph Mifsud (buzzfeednews.com)
BuzzFeed
Joseph Mifsud: Elusive Maltese Professor’s Passport And Wallet Found In Portugal (buzzfeednews.com)
BuzzFeed
Celeb Cheating Scandals, Who Stayed Together And Who Broke Up (buzzfeed.com)
CNN
Academic at heart of Clinton ‘dirt’ claim vanishes | CNN Politics
Associated Press
DocumentCloud