A fascinating investigation into how a Maltese criminal recently convicted of murder tried to make his way in the pan-Mediterranean betting world
Some way into this deeply researched article from the Italian investigative media outlet IrpiMedia, there is a complicated diagram, an influence map: one could describe it as a spider’s web.
What it shows is the network of connections between Adrian Agius – long considered one of Malta’s criminal “intoccabili” (“untouchables”) – and businesses and individuals with commercial and other links as far apart as Italy, the United Kingdom and Dubai.
It comes at a significant time. Last month, Adrian Agius was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murder of Maltese lawyer Carmel Chircop in 2015. At the same time, his brother Robert was convicted in connection with the separate 2017 murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. (Simone Olivelli’s article for IrpiMedia comes as part of a series dedicated to continuing her work under the hashtag #DaphneProject).
Based largely on encrypted communications, many of which came to light in the context of the investigations that finally led to these convictions, Olivelli’s article takes a wider look – across the Mediterranean, and beyond – into a web of personalities and players linking criminal networks (not just in Malta: the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta comes up, as does the mafia) to the legal betting industry and its various offshoots and side industries.
Why might such links exist? The article notes that Europol investigators had long considered the Agius brothers to be involved in drug trafficking and smuggling of fuel and cigarettes. They suggested the Maltese authorities follow the money in their investigations – in other words: how did they try and turn illicit gains into apparently licit ones? Was that what Agius was trying to do, or was he simply trying to cash in on the betting boom?
The article speaks to an era in Malta’s recent history when then Prime Minister Joseph Muscat dreamed, the article notes, of making the island into “the Singapore of the Mediterranean”. (Muscat himself has been on trial for financial crimes since 2023; the article mentions another figure who was holidaying with Muscat when he was arrested, in southern Italy, on a German warrant for tax evasion). The question of whether Malta’s role in the global betting industry is a triumph of entrepreneurialism or a magnet for shady dealings hangs over the article.
Starting from Agius, Olivelli finds himself writing about an ever-widening web of individuals and projects, some quite tenuously linked, many which never came off: the possibility of a casino being set up in Ghana, a business venture in Suriname, a 35-year-old Sicilian who was the promoter of a crypto project with links to betting (and currently under investigation for fraud), Slovakian assault rifles shipped from Sicily…
It’s a hard to follow world of companies changing hands, changing names; legitimate businesses mixed in with more compromised ones or acting as cover for them in one way or another; intermixed business relationships, where the apparent, ostensible commercial link between two individuals may not be the whole reality of the relationship or even anything close to it.
Besides Adrian Agius himself, one figure who comes up a lot is “Fabio” (not his real name), who IrpiMedia tracked down and interviewed. Fabio appears to have been a veteran of the online betting scene in which Agius was becoming involved as a sort of spotter, finding wealthy people to bet on particular platforms. “I never knew he was a criminal,” the article quotes Fabio as saying of Agius, calling their dealings purely “professional”. Presenting himself as a “friend of Fabio”, Agius then got in touch with another veteran of Italian online betting and, through him, with another man with a long history in Spain. When he was living in Malta, Fabio was also involved in the tourism industry. It was in this context that Fabio met the recipient of those Slovak assault rifles.
It is head-spinning stuff. What it adds up to isn’t clear. How many of Agius’s forays into the betting world came to fruition? “Fabio” describes him as a “mythomaniac”. What is certain is that Adrian Agius and his brother are now in prison, Carmel Chircop and Daphne Caruana Galizia are long dead, and the punters (generally) lose.
Original article (“La scommessa di Agius: I progetti d’investimento del criminale maltese con I bookmaker italiani”) by Simone Olivelli first published in Italian in IrpiMedia on 20 June 2025.
The article was produced in partnership with Amphora Media, OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) and the Times of Malta.
It’s available here.
IrpiMedia is a Milan-based Italian nonprofit investigative journalism outlet founded in 2012. Part of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), its reports deal with a range of inter-related topics including organised crime, corruption, financial misconduct and environmental abuse, often using open-course intelligence and data journalism methods, and working in collaboration with cross-border networks such as the OCCRP.
