The controversial Canadian-Indian businessman Sri Ram Tumuluri recently arrested by the Dubai police as part of a financial corruption investigation into several bounced cheques is being investigated in alleged corruption cases and scandals involving millions of dollars.
The government has said that the investigation is ongoing and that Tumuluri will be banned from the country if he doesn’t settle his debts.
Following his arrest, the details of Ram Tumuluri’s business across the world are emerging with tentacles across the globe. The Indian and the American media have this week written in detail about a trial of deception and lies which traces its roots to Canada and India.
The report mentions how a Malta journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia killed in October 2017 in a car bomb near her home within weeks after announcing that she would be exposing several financial scandals of the controversial Canadian-Indian businessman Sri Ram Tumuluri, spent several years investigating Ram Tumuluri till her tragic murder.
Although the Maltese national brothers George Degiorgio and his brother Alfred have confessed to the killing but close associates of Daphne Caruana Galizia have said the Malta authorities have not investigated the murder properly and several questions remain unanswered.
The murdered journalist had written in detail about the financial crimes of Sri Ram Tumuluri. The journalist, who had also worked on Panama Papers scandal, had written dozens of articles on Sri Rama Tumuluri and was set to release a big story when she was killed.
Through her “Running Commentary” blog, Daphne Caruana Galizia dedicated a considerable amount of time and resource to exposing Ram Tumuluri. Before her untimely death, in various articles on her popular site, she described Ram Tumuluri as “a fraudster with a shedload of unpaid debts in Canada.”
Mark Pawley is known for running Oxley Capital out of Singapore and doing shady deals. Recently, Ram Tumuluri has claimed that he had to flee Malta because a senior politician threatened him with a similar fate as the assassinated journalist.
However, the office of the politician has said that Ram Tumuluri’s claims are ludicrously wild and plainly false and he is telling lies in order to save his skin by throwing others under the bus. While working in Malta, the local media reported that Ram Tumuluri had an affair with Deborah Chappell, Maltese lawyer and former director of Technoline.
Local intelligence has said that Daphne Caruana-Galizia was also in the process of writing on this matter and the involvement of another politician in it but she was killed.
Ram Tumuluri was recently thrust again into limelight after evidence emerged that his UK-based Causis Group made several undeclared and corrupt payments in 2015 to Carmen Ciantar, the chief political advisor of Malta’s health minister Chris Fearne.
She resigned from her role after evidence was released that Carmen Ciantar received a total of €443,500 Euros from Gozo International Medicare Ltd – part of the VGH group. The money came from the firm’s account at the Dubai-headquartered Emirates NBD Bank.
Within a few months of the transfers, according to local daily the Times of Malta, she had gone to work as the head of Fearne’s election campaign – during which time he also appointed her CEO of FMS.
It’s understood that Malta authorities are seeking to speak to Ram Tumuluri but he has refused to go to the country to cooperate with the inquiry. He has said through his lawyers he has done nothing wrong by making these payments which were, according to his words, for a business deal.
In all his operations, Ram Tumuluri has a consistent pattern: he presents investors with deals he does not himself have the funds to invest in; portrays them as easy money opportunities; sets up an opaque offshore corporate structure; pulls in his associates and past business connections; obtains partial funding for the project; walks away from the project with any funds invested, having purposefully failed to file accounts; and moves on to an alternative project.
By maintaining a low level of tangible assets (i.e. renting rather than owning property), even in litigious situations, the plaintiffs are unable to make claims against any significant resources owned in Tumuluri’s name. An analysis of public records shows Tumuluri has consistently failed to file annual returns in companies he incorporated in India, the US, Canada and Singapore thereby not accounting for where the funds have gone.
