In what can only be described as another devastating blow to the prosecution’s already fragile case in the high-profile 17 Black compilation proceedings, the liquidator of Harbinson Forensics Limited took the stand today and delivered testimony that raises more questions than it answers. Under cross-examination by Professor Stefano Filletti, the liquidator Dorothy Brown was forced to admit she had zero direct knowledge of the company’s payments, operations, or clients despite being the person appointed to wind it up.
The prosecution and the Magisterial Inquiry has leaned heavily on forensic analysis supposedly provided by Harbinson Forensics. The testimony showed just how hollow that reliance has become.
The Liquidator’s Damning Admissions
Dorothy Brown, testifying via audiovisual link, was crystal clear on one point: she acted entirely at Harbinson’s behest. She confirmed that Jeremy Harbinson himself approached her in September 2024 to initiate liquidation proceedings.
Communications with Harbinson were mainly by email and she could not even recall the phone number used by Harbinson when he had called to engage her. She was aware that Interpol is actively trying to trace him.
When pressed on the substance of the company she was liquidating, Brown’s answers were astonishingly empty: she had no direct knowledge of any payments, operations or clients of the company even though she liquidated the company.
The only document she had ever seen was the final set of accounts, at a time when the company was not actively trading.
She confirmed that Maltese Authorities did not intervene to try and stop the liquidation of its court appointed expert company.
The company’s registered address was simply a private home and not an office. Moreover she also confirmed that the company which received tens of millions of tax payer money had no employees. Not even one employee !
On the reason for liquidation itself, Brown repeated the official line: the company had “ceased trading.” She had no other knowledge of the company’s operations or the “true reason” behind the decision to close.
Prof Stefano Filletti’s Cross-Examination
Filletti zeroed in on the glaring contradictions. How, Filletti demanded, could a company that had been engaged for years, that had earned such enormous sums from the Maltese justice system itself, suddenly “cease trading” with no further explanation?
The liquidator had to concede, point after point, that she possessed no meaningful insight into the very entity she had been tasked with dissolving. No records preserved by her office. No understanding of clients beyond the Maltese state payments. No explanation for why the forensic practice would simply shut its doors after pocketing millions in public funds for work on this very case.
Stefano Filletti’
In one of the most telling moments, Filletti emphasized that the company had been active for years and had only ceased operations recently yet the liquidator could offer nothing beyond the bare phrase “ceased trading.”
The contrast could not have been starker: a multi-million-euro expert firm contracted by the Maltese state, now reduced to a shell whose liquidator knows virtually nothing about its actual business.
Filletti explained that the company which was a court expert that produced the report no longer exists.
Its liquidator has no knowledge of how it operated or who its clients truly were.
All records were left in the hands of the very man who is now untraceable.
The official reason for closure: “ceased trading” after receiving tens of millions of euros in Maltese court payments.
Jeremy Harbinson
This is not a minor procedural hiccup. This is the key forensic expert’s company being wound up, its principal director effectively off-grid, and its liquidator admitting under oath she has no operational knowledge whatsoever. The defence has every right to argue that the state’s star forensic evidence is now unverifiable, unchallengeable in any real sense, and built on sand.
