When MFSA boss Joe Cuschieri travelled with Yorgen Fenech to a gaming shindig in Las Vegas in May 2018, he had left the Malta Gaming Authority just a few weeks before. In comments to the press yesterday he made it a point to clarify that he was no longer the gaming regulator when he travelled [...]

You could dismiss this One TV “story” as yet another small-time opportunity for Labour to pick on Jason Azzopardi, someone their people love to hate. But being a political party does not absolve them of their responsibilities to democracy, and we have gone too far down the road of tyranny if we stop worrying about [...]

Joe Cuschieri admitted yesterday that while serving as CEO of the Malta Financial Services Authority he travelled to Las Vegas with Yorgen Fenech to advise him on “regulatory issues”. The financial services regulator told The Malta Independent yesterday he gave his time and advice without payment or compensation. Joe Cuschieri is one of the two [...]

  The Malta Gaming Authority licensed a company owned by the Tumas Group, Oracle Gaming Shops Ltd, as a Type 1 Gaming Services company. The licensing was granted in 2020. Employees of Oracle Gaming Shops were told the company was set up to take over the gaming businesses that were run by Yorgen Fenech before [...]

Will every government minister, parliamentarian, regulator, police officer and sundry person who should have really known better who accepted Yorgen Fenech’s hospitality in the last three years or so, been on his plane though they weren’t his pilot, fucked him though they weren’t Mrs Fenech, driven him around though they weren’t his driver, cooked pasta [...]

Manuel Delia · Setting The Date The power of the prime minister to set any date they please within a 5-year term of a parliament to call a general election is another power the prime minister should not have. Rather nostalgically, they call it ‘the prime minister’s prerogative’. A word like prerogative should have no [...]

Photo: Matthew Mirabelli, Times of Malta Look at this Times of Malta interview with Robert Abela from 2 September. It was six months after Miriam Pace, 54, was killed when her Ħamrun house collapsed into a building site next door. Her husband, Carmel Pace, publicly complained that his wife’s death ‘had meant nothing [...]

People use numbers a lot. To measure time and to describe the weather; in school and at work; to count money, measure distances, reach phones open locks, read and flip through TV channels. Engineers use numbers to erect buildings and roll out roads. Doctors count cells and dose medicines. A few years back I wrote an article [...]

Manuel Delia · Go Back To Islamistan A history teacher in France was explaining to his students the true meaning of freedom of speech in a secular world. He showed them cartoons of Muhammad saying he was aware that this was a taboo for Muslims and they’d be offended by it. But freedom of speech [...]

A 15-judge panel of the European Court of Justice heard today arguments from NGO Repubblika in its case arguing that appointments to the judiciary in April 2019 were not in conformity with the Treaty of European Union that requires judicial independence. Three judges and three magistrates were appointed by Joseph Muscat’s government in spite of [...]

I’ll refer here to a Times of Malta letter from Eddie Privitera not because it deserves a response in and of itself, but because in one point he makes he repeats a general line from this week’s hymnbook for Labour spokesmen from across the partisan divide. Eddie Privitera makes the case that Bernard Grech is [...]

Carmel Caccopardo of the ADPD makes a fair point. Robert Abela used to be the lawyer for the Maksars who are suspected of involvement in the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. They are also suspected of being crime lords in their own right. In any case they’re running free. It seems that the government may [...]

The government continues to ignore calls from the Council of Europe and others to give parliament space to oversee its activities. Co-opting the prime minister’s chief of staff to parliament, while he retains his job, takes to an unprecedented extreme the hijack of parliament. Why do we need a parliament at all? Why do we [...]

Archbishop Charles Scicluna was in quite a mood yesterday. He looked at the camera and wagging his finger he “cursed” profits made from usury: that’s excessive interest made on loans above the legal limit of 8%. He spoke of suicides of people who could not repay payday loans. He looked like he had specific and [...]

We only have the Kaċċaturi u Nassaba’s society’s version of what happened yesterday. They say a foreign couple held down a bird trapper and punched him in the face. In a separate incident a foreign couple – it is not clear if these are different people – set free a trapped bird and ran away [...]

The National Audit Office (NAO) had issued a report on the Electrogas power station and indicated ‘shortcomings’. There had been a cheaper option, the NAO found. To many, this was and is a clear indicator of corruption. The evidence was damning but the government, at that time headed by the most corrupt political person in [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Equality and liberty are intertwined. People of all races should have the right to vote. That will not solve all problems. We still discriminate between women and men, but we have come far in the last 100 years, further than we would have if women were still [...]

The student union KSU, is under pressure from the minister of education Owen Bonnici to withdraw its recommendation to the university authorities to postpone graduation ceremonies to March 2021. KSU, with the agreement of student societies and representative organisations, has asked the university authorities to reschedule graduation ceremonies normally held in November in the hope [...]

Earlier, I criticised the prime minister for his attack on the very notion of a public independent inquiry. He was saying inquiries "circumvent the courts", which they don't. I reminded the prime minister that the processes of an inquiry have been provided for in our law since 1977 and this is not some innovation designed [...]

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