The Times of Malta revealed on Tuesday that fugitive Jan Marsalek, suspected of involvement in Russian espionage, was named in a civil court dispute in London as the secret financier of a Libyan oil project in 2016 connected to a Maltese company.
According to the newspaper, Marsalek’s uncovered role in financing the purchase of three onshore oil drilling rigs in Libya in 2016 by the company Lurasco led to a legal dispute between two former business partners in the project, who for the first time reported Marsalek’s involvement in the deal.Businessman Ahmed Ben Halim, one of the directors of LH Seferis, a Malta-based company whose portfolio includes Lurasco, said he only discovered in 2022 that Marsalek was behind EAL Energy, the firm that invested in the drilling rigs inside Libya.
The newspaper added that Ben Halim had established H Seferus in 2011 as an investment company, originally founded in the Cayman Islands and recently registered in Malta.A spokesperson for Ben Halim and his companies told the Times of Malta that his former business partner, Joe Bowman, did not disclose Marsalek’s role in EAL Energy until 2022.
The newspaper continued that after this discovery, the spokesperson stated that Ben Halim and his companies took “all reasonable and proper steps to understand the legal implications of this disclosure and to act based on the facts they had recently received,” according to the Times of Malta.
