Magistrate Rachel Montebello threw out today a request by Yorgen Fenech’s lawyer to find lawyers representing Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family in contempt of court. Lawyers Charles Mercieca, Gianluca Caruana Curran and Marion Camilleri accused Jason Azzopardi and Therese Comodini Cachia of defying an earlier order by Magistrate Rachel Montebello about using data from Yorgen Fenech’s [...]
Look, Malta’s vaccination program is doing well. Compared with the rest of the EU it is doing very well. So Robert Abela could go on TV and say his government is acquitting itself reasonably well in the national vaccination effort. Why does he feel the need to lie, exaggerate, and burst his own credibility, such [...]
Note to Aaron Farrugia: if you’re going for gimmicks, make sure they work. The green-fingered minister is mailing a letter to every household with a bag of wildflower seeds and instructions on how to grow them. Several of the seeds that still need to be posted belong to species that are past their growth season [...]
Did I say that even after his resignation in disgrace from the financial services authority, Joe Cuschieri was still a director of a government company? I was wrong. He's a director of two government companies. Apart from the one I reported on yesterday, the Malta Business Registry says Joe Cuschieri is also the director of [...]
You might think I’m asking for it. Think again. Newsbook revealed this morning that the parliamentary committee that reviews reports by the commissioner for standards is tomorrow due to discuss a report after a complaint Repubblika made about an advert run by Carmelo Abela. It was a full-page advert taken out in newspapers, half of [...]
This time of five years ago we were in the middle of the storm after the Panama Papers revelations. Three companies: one owned by Keith Schembri, the other owned by Konrad Mizzi, and a third, Egrant, with an unknown owner. Joseph Muscat excused Keith Schembri saying this had been the private choice of a private [...]
Sent in by someone known to me: President Emeritus Marie Louis Coleiro Preca saw it fit to advise the Labour Party to apologise for the corruption, scandals and numerous other misdeeds committed by them not only whilst in government but also in the run up to the 2013 elections. Without wanting to go into the [...]
Judge Consuelo Scerri Herrera was asked by Vince Muscat il-Koħħu not to hear the case of the 2010 HSBC armed robbery because he has knowledge of the involvement of a sitting (and a former) cabinet minister. Vince Muscat has so far not identified who the sitting minister he has in mind is although suspicion inevitably [...]
Joseph Cuschieri, who resigned in disgrace from his post as head of the financial services authority after the press exposed a tryst in Las Vegas with Yorgen Fenech, is still the director of a government-owned company. The Malta Business Registry lists Joseph Cuschieri as one of three government-appointed directors of Safe City Limited. But the [...]
The Commission on Gender-Based and Domestic Violence has withdrawn a Facebook post that condemned me for what they described as an act of gender-based violence, calling on me to apologise to Rosianne Cutajar for this article I had written about her. The decision to withdraw their statement came a day after I filed a judicial [...]
Dutch journalist Siebe Sietsma won well-deserved awards last year for his first film on the worldwide passports trade. Follow this update (which you can watch with English subtitles and without the need of watching the first film) that highlights the flimsy legal basis that Malta’s government has used and continues to use to flog our [...]
A classic trope of the zombie apocalypse movie is dropping ironic mementoes from the time before the world went mad that expose the lack of foresight and mindless optimism as society blindly ran into a wall. You know the line. Man proposes. God laughs. Here's some mindless optimism from just some weeks ago. They haven't [...]
You've got to hand it to them. They know how to play irony when they put their minds to it. Here's a billboard put up by the Armed Forces presumably to promote their recruitment drive. "We are prepared for any call for help," the billboard claims. They could have gone on to say we ignore [...]
I let many things slide. And I would have lest slide as well the baseless accusation that this post I put up a few days ago about Rosianne Cutajar was “a violent act of gender-based abuse”, having given it a spirited response on another blog post. Until I realised that the government agency set up [...]
Daniel Micallef having “no problem” with apologising to those who “feel hurt” for the behaviour of “the few” needs to be put against the background of what is this country deserves an apology. I’m not a man of a few words. But one can hardly say more than this screenshot of the news in this [...]
As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” And he said, “Who are You, Lord?” Then the Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against [...]
And there we have it. Sorry is not, after all, the hardest word. Marie Louise Coleiro yesterday said that the Labour Party should apologise to people who assumed, wrongly, that the party was a moral organisation. Daniel Micallef, fast earning the reputation of being a good guy, said he would not have a problem saying [...]
Watch this video of Mario Frendo - then working for NET TV - door-stepping Labour politicians in 2016 to ask them what they made of Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi's Panama companies. https://youtu.be/cesA_jhVK0o You can see in their eyes that all of them understand that the companies were set up as part of a bribery [...]
Look at these two pointless adverts on page 21 of yesterday’s it-Torċa. My first instinct is to wonder if anyone is seriously persuaded to vote for a political candidate over another just because they take out a picture of their stupid mug on a newspaper and wish us Happy Easter as if Christ was waiting [...]
In place of Last Supper exhibitions and masked penitents dragging chains around their ankles, it is now a new Maltese Easter tradition to behave as if no one is drowning in our waters. The Maltese government and army took an enormous risk over this weekend. They ignored reports of three boats in distress in our [...]