Updated on 1 August 2021, 07:11. Follow this link to see reply sent by Chris Mifsud.
I don’t know Chris Mifsud, who runs publicity house MPS.
Though I run a small media outlet – this website – I do not field directly booked advertising. I could do with the money, but not with the strings attached to it. The adverts you see on this website are placed directly by Google and by Taboola. I don’t get a say on what’s put on and the advertisers don’t get a say in what I do. The revenue from the whole thing amounts to around €300 a month so it is what it is.
I also turn down all requests for paid fluff pieces meant to look like original content but really promoting the interests of the hidden payer. With most people, I have little credibility as it is. The last thing I need is to retail what I have to bidders.
So since I don’t take bookings for advertising nor for paid-for “advertorials”, I never needed to be mates with publicists and advertising agents.
After I saw the correspondence between Yorgen Fenech and Chris Mifsud from the morning of 16 November 2018, I got curious about the person in that exchange I had never heard of.
Yorgen Fenech asked his advice about “picking a victim” for ruinous SLAPP suits giving him a short hit-list made up of David Casa, Times of Malta, Lovin Malta, and Manuel Delia, identifying me as “pretty much the easiest win”, “the ideal first case”, the candidate for a court order to pay the Tumas Group “an absurd figure”.
Chris Mifsud, who charges Yorgen Fenech for his advice at some sort of hourly rate or cushy retainer, did not tell Yorgen Fenech (by then outed as the owner of 17 Black and therefore everybody’s favourite suspect in the murder of another journalist) that ruining journalists with SLAPP suits was – how shall I put this? – not that nice.
I looked around to see who this Chris Mifsud was and what he stood for apart from the journalism-bashing sprees of his clients, and found this video he did just over a year ago for a Times of Malta campaign looking for the public’s donations “to support independent media”.
“Independent journalism is there to inform us, challenge us, and provide stability for our democracy,” Chris Mifsud tells no one in particular. Thank you, Sir. Nice of you to have my back.