I received some very encouraging messages addressed to the friend complaining to me yesterday we were too few in Valletta. I've picked out two of them that seek to benefit from history or from experience. This first is from a letter Victor Hugo wrote in exile. The reference to 7.5 millions is to the suffrage [...]

Updated, adds denial from Joe Bannister (18/11/2017) Yesterday I reported that Joe Bannister, as regulator of the financial services sector in Malta, granted an investment services licence to a company whose designated contact person is co-director with him in a company in the Cayman Islands. Joe Bannister has this morning got in touch with me [...]

I could not cheer up a friend of mine yesterday when we walked down Republic Street and he was saddened because so few had come. In the company of hundreds one should feel emboldened. A demonstration like that in any city would command respect and attention. But here in Malta we are used to huddled [...]

Italian journalists yesterday gathered in Ostia to protest for press freedom. They chose the location because an Italian journalist had a few days before been head-butted and chased with a metal pipe by a crook he was questioning. They chose the date because it was 40 years to the day since the first Italian journalist [...]

From someone known to me: Quite apart from the massive implications for us as a nation of the contempt shown for Joseph Muscat’s governance standards by the EU Parliament last Wednesday, there are some other considerations that deserve some focus. Joseph Muscat’s cheer-leaders in the EUP, led by the anti-EU flag-waver in-chief Dr Alfred Sant, [...]

Here's an eye-witness account of the iron curtain press conference Alfred Sant, Miriam Dalli and Marlene Mizzi delivered Tuesday. Frank is right. The most significant thing about the whole charade was the fact that it was scheduled to start right as the ceremony naming the same room for Daphne Caruana Galizia ended. It was an [...]

From today's leading editorial in The Times: "Those protesters are not dazzled by the bright lights of the Prime Minister’s glowing economic statistics, his passport sales, his mega projects or his pseudo-liberal antics. "The death of Ms Caruana Galizia has changed the game. Occupy Justice is a power to reckon with."

Italian authorities are complaining on the record that the Maltese authorities are failing to cooperate in their hunt to stop Italian mafia organisations laundering their money here. Il fatto quotidiano reported yesterday on arrests of Italian criminals believed to have used Malta as a platform for illegal gambling and fraud. The Italian authorities have frozen [...]

This is a statement issued today by #occupyjustice:   A month to the day of the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, #occupyjustice delivered a bayleaf plant to the Office of the Prime Minister in Valletta and left it on the steps of Castille along with a poignant message. “Prime Minister, may this bayleaf plant [...]

  Charles Scicluna is not naive. He knows just what he's up against. In a statement today the curia said "of course, in a society as politically polarised as ours, there is always the risk – not to say the certainty – that anything we say, no matter how balanced, will be perceived as partisan or [...]

When I got the invitation to visit Strasbourg for the naming of the press room of the European Parliament for Daphne Caruana Galizia I jumped at the chance at finally meeting her sons and her husband and personally tell them how I felt about their loss, about their mother and wife and about them. Of [...]

While the entire community of political views, left to right, north to south, across countries and parties, stood to criticise Joseph Muscat for dragging Malta out of democracy and fundamental rights, the spin machine in Castille revved at full throttle to drown the news into drivel and distraction. The Prime Minister "had a meeting" in [...]

I received this press release: On Thursday there will be a silent walk in honour of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who exactly one month ago was brutally assassinated in a car bomb in Malta, 16th October 2017. The walk will start from Valletta’s main entrance at 18:30, and walk through Republic Street to where Daphne’s Memorial [...]

The political parties of the European Parliament rarely agree on anything. Certainly almost never to the extent that they were today, united in disgust at Joseph Muscat's government abuse of its power. They are concerned that the law in Malta is not applied equally for everyone. That the press is not free to speak without [...]

As MEPs resoundingly endorse the PANA committee's recommendation of an investigation into Pilatus Bank, Godfrey Leone Ganado analyses in-depth the multiple FIAU reports into the institution widely believed to be a money laundering engine for the Azerbaijan regime and Maltese political figures. He starts by providing extracts from relevant reports in order to pave the [...]

Malta Labour MEPs said today they were against any investigations into whether Nexia BT, the accountancy firm belong to the prime minister's accountant Brian Tonna, complied with money laundering regulations. This in spite of the fact that such investigation was called by the PANA committee that investigated and reported on the fall-out in Europe from [...]

Former Labour prime minister Alfred Sant told me today he wanted Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi to resign from office. But then he changed his mind. I was asking him questions at a press conference he was giving with his assistants Miriam Dalli and Marlene Mizzi, the first conference ever in the newly named Salle [...]

In its report on the Paradise Leaks, Le Monde interprets the leaks from Appleby to show that the company Joe Bannister “managed, misappropriated public funds from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)”. This concerns a company registered in the British Virgin Islands that invested in a Russian mining company and applied and obtained [...]

What is it with this guy that whenever a matter of national importance comes up that he's not setting himself on the agenda he buys a First Class ticket for himself, Keith Schembri and Kurt Farrugia and goes to sell passports? While the European Parliament debates today the collapse of rule of law in Malta, [...]