Guest post by Andrew Borg-Cardona. Even if I were a journalist, I hope I would not have attended Minister Owen Bonnici’s press conference on Tuesday, when he sought to justify his failure to show support for the media. He sought to explain why he prefers, apparently, to allow corporate bullies to continue to forum shop in [...]
I barely finish writing about how Joseph Muscat’s staff persistently shame the country in the eyes of the world and in steps Glenn Bedingfield with his foot - nay, both his feet - firmly in it. He gets questions from The Guardian and though he does better than his boss – who has been dodging [...]
Josef Caruana says he wants to be an MEP to compensate for the nasty Nationalists who make Malta look bad in the world. Let’s just look at Josef Caruana’s own record, shall we? And we’ll stick to the highlights. Josef Caruana was the editor of the General Workers’ Union’s l-orizzont. The Malta Independent flattered him [...]
In my March 3rd story on Satabank I wrote that MyPos, a UK company related to some of the ultimate beneficial ownership of SataBank, was "investigated" for use of its equipment by fraudsters. My report should have stated that fraudsters were investigated, not the supplier of the equipment they use. The error in my report occurred after I reported on a similar [...]
The ‘urgent’ awarding of a planning permit for the prime minister to gut his Burmarrad house is not just embarrassing favouritism. I am not an avukat-perit but I can smell rot as much as the next guy. The permit granted to the prime minister is also illegal. Here’s a summary of the facts. Firstly, Planning [...]
We never expected the Labour Party to be our ally in the fight for free speech. We never expected them to protect journalists. We never dared hope they’d protect The Times of Malta, The Malta Independent and Malta Today. We never saw much chance they would defend Lovin’ Malta or The Shift News. In each [...]
Anġlu Farrugia may protect Keith Schembri from answering the question whether Schembri was a wedding guest at the Four Seasons in Florence at Ali Sadr's wedding. But alas he cannot protect Malta from the consequences of the friendship struck between Keith Schembri, Ali Sadr and the rest of the gang of crooks that colonised our [...]
In an interview with 'Investment Migration Insider', a website promoting citizenship-sales schemes, Christian Kaelin responds to criticism of passport sales schemes focusing particularly on Malta and retorting in very much the same vein as Joseph Muscat on similar occasions. Christian Kaelin argues criticism of Henley and Partners is largely the product of "envy of (their) [...]
Correspondence between Christian Kaelin of Henley & Partners and SCL Group shows that Kaelin asked SCL to introduce him to Joseph Muscat in June 2011. At the time Lawrence Gonzi headed a PN government in Malta and Joseph Muscat had been Leader of the Opposition for three years. The correspondence indicates that SCL – that [...]
Watch this interview that Fr Joe Borg and myself conducted with Pieter Omtzigt on RTK yesterday to discuss the answers he got from ambassadors for 47 European countries in the Council of Europe about the aftermath of the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The response was at first reported in Malta coated with the padding [...]
By Andrew Borg-Cardona: On Monday 9th April, the House is set to discuss amendments to the law that will take into account those made by Jason Azzopardi that will seek to remove the clear and present danger of SLAPP suits in foreign jurisdictions. The word on the street is that the Government will not support [...]
The permit issued on a weekend to Joseph Muscat, three weeks after applying, raises suspicions that go beyond the grotesque abuse of a public service forced to serve the private interest of the prime minister. See this story first as background. The record speaks for itself. When still Alfred Sant’s poodle, the permit to develop [...]
Visit this site where you get instructions on how to get Cambridge Analytica to tell you if your personal data has been harvested and what it is they know about you. The data protection agent for Cambridge Analytica is its mother company SCL Elections, which is a UK company where European Data Protection rules still [...]
Planning Authority staff have been called in at the last minute on a Saturday morning for "urgent work" to find that they were called to process and approve an application by a "Dr Joseph Muscat" for some interior decoration at his Burmarrad home. "Dr Joseph Muscat" is obviously Malta's prime minister who has today, on [...]
This website is hosting the first viewing in Malta of a film by Italian news organisation La Repubblica and documentary makers 42° Parallelo. The film "Daphne" will first be shown in Perugia, Italy, at the International Journalism Festival. The first Malta viewing is being held on 21st April, 2018 at the Sir Temi Zammit Hall, [...]
The comments around Graffiti’s action at the Planning Authority this week are so loaded with irony that the young guys who took that action must feel perfectly entitled to feel pride for what they did. One remark was classic MDA. Developers speak like Frankenstein’s monster in the Boris Karloff classics: why don’t people realise he’s [...]
Godfrey Leone Ganado analyses Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perception Index and highlights some important conclusions: To start with, corruption is generally defined as “the misuse of public power for private benefit”. In its summary, the Report highlights that Malta’s ranking dropped from an average ranking of 38th between 2004 and 2015, dropping to 47th in [...]
Sometimes we have to spell the basics out. I've seen online trolls reacting to the news that Cambridge Analytica harvested 6,000 Facebook accounts from Malta speak like the proper idiots they are. One retort is 'why be too bothered about 6,000 accounts when Labour's majority was of 40,000?' The logic -- oh what a mistaken [...]
“The Conscience in Media award recognizes journalists who knowingly have endured great personal costs while pursuing the highest tenets of their profession,” says Sherry Beck Paprocki, president of ASJA. This selective award has been presented only twelve times since 1975. This is no fetishistic album of cuttings of awards and prizes given to a favourite [...]
More evidence is emerging that Cambridge Analytica harvested data from Malta Facebook accounts. Why did it need it? Because it could profit from using that data by providing services to a client here. Cambridge Analytica and its mother company SCL have a very specific type of client: political parties or political candidates. Someone in Malta [...]