I sputtered 1,400 words this morning to explain why I think this country is not normal, but just look at this: Look at the person "liking" the message. Claire Cuschieri. That's the daughter of the president of Malta and the wife of Joseph Cuschieri, he who resigned as chief regulator of the financial services industry [...]

Every country has the government it deserves – Joseph de Maistre Uganda is well-known for the grand-scale theft of public funds corruption involving public officials at all levels of society as well as widespread political patronage systems. Elite corruption in Uganda is through the benefaction system which has been aggravated by foreign aid. Aid has [...]

If this had been a normal country there would be a political crisis right now. Grey-listing by the FATF is not something that happened to us. This is not some misfortune like an oil price crisis or an oil tanker leak or an earthquake. This is a catastrophic failure of policy by our political leaders. [...]

Let us all send a message of thanks to the inventor of Muscatonomics, the man who like a latter-day Moses led us out of the infamy of the nasty Nationalists, and herded us to the promised land of l-aqwa żmien. Spare a moment to thank Joseph Muscat and the Joshua to Muscat’s Moses. Thank Robert [...]

Don’t underestimate the darkness of the days ahead. And don’t underestimate the anger, the frustration, and the willingness of our government to hang others for lynching in order to avoid consequences on themselves. This will be ugliest for people whom the government will find it easy to project as candidates for responsibility for the hardship [...]

Think of our financial services after grey-listing as a once glorious entertainment neighbourhood that has gone to seed. Think of the Atlantic City Boardwalk after the prohibition heyday and before Playboy bought a huge plot. Think of the streets down from the Boulevard de Clichy echoing the Belle Époque in the din of Japanese tourists [...]

Education, education, and education. Try to think beyond the next 10 years, which is exactly what this country struggles to do most of the time. We need to rebuild our offer to the world if we are going to become an investment destination and that will mean preparing a new generation of workers that is [...]

I asked in an earlier post what we should be doing now, as a country, to start earning again the trust of the rest of the world that we are reasonable partners on the world stage and a place where you don’t need to be a criminal to do business. It wasn’t the right question. [...]

And so it is that days after Robert Abela promised to put us firmly on the path of “l-aqwa fid-dinja”, the world has stuck a label to our door saying we’re not to be trusted. In what I promise to be a brief moment of uncharacteristic lack of humility (the moment has started, in case [...]

This is a film of the launch of The Third Siege of Malta recorded on 9 June 2021 in Mistra. The discussion is chaired by Dr George Vital Zammit with Louiselle Vassallo, Professor Ġorġ Mallia and Christian Peregin (starts at 39:30). The film also includes readings from The Third Siege of Malta delivered by Winston [...]

Watch this video produced and distributed on Mario Cutajar’s official Facebook page. It’s a fluff piece for something called “the public service week”. The “occasion”, as they describe it, is a visit by Mario Cutajar to the public library in Valletta which shouldn’t be extraordinary in principle, though he looks in the video like he [...]

Here's a Facebook conversation to represent all others. This tribalism is also how we tell the FATF we'll never fix what we get wrong because we never think Labour could get anything wrong.

Manuel Delia · The Blame Game Whilst hoping Clyde Caruana pulls it off in the last minute and saves the country from grey-listing by the FATF, his cabinet colleagues are still getting ready for the worst. Mind you, that doesn’t necessarily mean what it should mean. If they haven’t undertaken the reforms that were necessary [...]

I had six honest serving men. They taught me all I knew. Their names were ‘where’ and ‘what’ and ‘when’ and ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘who’. - Rudyard Kipling It’s been nearly 6 months, since December 2020 when the Parliamentary Secretary for Equality Rosianne Cutajar and Charles Farrugia, one of her political aides, were exposed [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The magistrate presiding over the compilation of evidence against Fenech heard a complaint from his lawyers after Times of Malta published conversations Fenech had had with Anton Attard, who sought advice on fixing betting odds to manipulate voting in an international singing competition. The report came in [...]

Reactions to the by now infamous “she dished out oranges in bags to old people” police report have been mixed. The episode wasn’t helped by some headlines written by people who judged the initiative as trivial and a good opportunity to poke fun at the Repubblika activists who, annoyingly, are too often right and rarely [...]

What is happening at the Public Accounts Committee would be an outrage on our democracy if we had a democracy. Gianella Demarco is Paul Apap Bologna’s lawyer. She works for him and speaks on his behalf. He’s not on trial there. He’s just a witness. He should not need legal representation or some form of [...]

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