Edwin Vassallo said he was annoyed with a piece I wrote on Friday where I challenged Adrian Delia to reassure us his leadership campaign and his party since his election were not funded at least in part by Yorgen Fenech. It’s likely that wasn’t really the cause of his irritation. After all it’s not like [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Chris Cardona, Keith Schembri and Joseph Muscat are named and renamed by witnesses in the proceedings against the people charged with killing Caruana Galizia. "The fact they knew about the identity of the killers before everyone else did seems now uncontested. The likelihood that they used that [...]

Anywhere else the arrest of three-quarters of a country's traffic police would be a shocking scandal. But Malta is the country where the prime minister was implicated in the worst sort of corruption that was eventually covered up through the commissioning of the murder of a journalist. Ten years ago you could have said Malta [...]

Malta Today surveyed members of the PN and asked them where they stand on Adrian Delia’s leadership and if they prefer him over the parliamentary group. Fifty-seven per cent of party members – the people that would be eligible to replace him – support Adrian Delia and want him to stay on. That result means [...]

#occupyjustice statement: Two months ago #occupyjustice called for the arrest of corrupt individuals, involved directly, or indirectly, in the plot hatched to assassinated investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia -  a plot that leads right up the steps of Auberge de Castille, into the Office of a disgraced Prime Minister. We are still waiting. These people [...]

The Police Department has hit the wall. Thanks to Manwel Mallia, Carmelo Abela and Michael Farrugia; thanks rather to Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri, Malta’s only law enforcement agency and in practice the prosecutor of people charged with crimes is being consumed in flames of ignominy. It’s commonplace to remember there are some perfectly diligent, [...]

March 2013 marked the dawn of a new era under the leadership of Kink Joseph Muscat. One of his first loaded gestures was that of paying himself for the use of his own car. It signalled that stealing from taxpayers was fair game. In the best of leadership traditions, Joseph signalled that if you were [...]

There is no satisfaction in hearing Yorgen Fenech on tape reassuring himself that only a few thousand “iddisprati” felt anything about the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. “Iddisprati” and variations on the theme like “indannati”, “imdejjqin”, “iffissati” (usually preceded by that proverbial Maltese number that amounts to irrelevance “erba’ iddisprati, erba’ indannati,” and so on) [...]

There is something surreal about The Times of Malta’s interview of this morning with Armin Ernst who runs the three formerly publicly owned hospitals that now belong to American subsidiary Steward Health Care. The newspaper says he was reacting to a Malta Today report that reported that Steward’s predecessors Vitals Global Healthcare had massed debts [...]

In an Autumn 2018 survey Eurobarometer found that 68% of Maltese respondents trusted their police force. That made the police (together with the public administration) the second most trusted institution in the country, more than local councils (64%), parliament (59%) and the EU (56%) and far more than political parties (36%), the written press (32%) [...]

A desperate situation is when one is on the verge of despair. This is the situation with the Partit Nazzjonalista. A cancerous syndrome diagnosis is not yet pronounced. But is felt encrypted in brain cells of most; a condition that could indicate severe psychosis that could lead to suicide. He who contemplates suicide is a [...]

  The comparative analysis is based on the accounts submitted to the Electoral Commission in accordance with the Financing of the Political Parties Act, and the guidelines issued by the Electoral Commission. I do not intend to comment on every line item, but only on the most material ones. INCOME Comments During 2018, the PN [...]

July 2017. The government reverses a standing police policy to insist that police officers have an exemplary record. Instead policemen who have been fired or have left the corps because of criminal offences would now be able to wear the uniform again. There the government sent a very important and very ominous signal. The police [...]

For all the talk of an elite clan in the PN who have been preventing Adrian Delia from bringing in new faces, the party leader has an obvious difficulty to produce officials that can be described as new. Francis Zammit Dimech is interim secretary general of the PN now. There were no other candidates for [...]

Heroes do not put a stop to the current mess at the PN by mumbling to Adrian Delia at parliamentary group meetings only to be ignored. It is not heroic to live in perpetual hope as an asteroid tumbles on an inexorable collision course with your attic. Hope, without action, is a dangerous thing. As [...]

Trolls who support Adrian Delia are full of venom these days for people identified as ‘blue 17’. The Adrian Delia trolls, presumably concerned that 17 is a very large number when deducted from 28, have shortlisted 10 usual suspects and called them Judas, traitors. I got a shade of that too. People tell me my [...]

So today it seems we’re back to the waiting game. Replacing Clyde Puli and Robert Arrigo will be side shows in which, one would imagine, the support base Adrian Delia still enjoys will be measured. That only really depends on whether there will be candidates that clearly represent a position in favour or against Adrian [...]

Someone who means well put up a collage of 17 members of the PN parliamentary group and labelled them “17 Blue Heroes”. They’ve been identified as the small majority in the group that has told Adrian Delia to pack his bags. As a snapshot of what happened the last time the PN’s parliamentary group met [...]

Sent in by Spartacus. What Sidney Smith (a clergyman and author) said of George Canning after the latter became Prime Minister in 1827: “Canning in office is like a fly in amber. Nobody cares about the fly; the only question is: How the hell did he get there?” (The reader is advised to substitute Adrian [...]

Adrian Delia’s act of schoolyard bullying from this morning has to be some sort of turning point. For everyone else, if not for him. In an earlier piece, I wrote how Adrian Delia compared the investigations into his Soho affairs with the evidence planted on Pietru Pawl Busuttil’s farm to frame him for the murder [...]