Alfred Zammit, not the Mayor of Valletta but the little-known mandarin pottering away at the Financial Intelligence Agency, has risen to the top. It’s a place he’s been close to for many years, living through the organisation’s infancy and the coming and going of different directors. In between other directors he was ‘acting boss’, the [...]

Rene Antonelli from former Transport Minister's constituency of Dingli is one of the TM officials seen beating a motorist in a video published yesterday by Lovin Malta of an incident that reportedly happened on 26 October. Antonelli was handpicked by Ian Borg to work in the enforcement unit of Transport Malta. Sources at the agency [...]

Facts on the 26 October beating of a motorist by Transport Malta officers revealed yesterday when a video of the incident was published by Lovin Malta are still sparse. Except that we know it happened because we can see a film of it. Lovin Malta described the victim as “dark skinned”. Combined with the fact [...]

Statement by #occupyjustice: Last night, #occupyjustice activists set up an illuminated spider’s web outside Castille,  with some of the main protagonists of some of the worst corruption scandals that have been exposed over the past few years depicted as spiders. The visual is intended to communicate how a gang of corrupt individuals infiltrated [...]

I don’t want to sound like I know what I’m talking about. If by the end of this you’re not thoroughly confused, I failed in delivering to you my utter bewilderement at what just happened. So yesterday I wrote how Magistrate Clare Stafrace Zammit had been picked to take over Repubblika’s case against Police Commissioner [...]

Cartoon by Steve Bonello, see: https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/islanders-november-13-2022.993960 Mark Camilleri, author, former Labour Party activist and government official, wrote on his blog that Robert Abela rented his Żejtun property to a Russian oligarch suspected of paying a bribe to Keith Schembri when he was chief of staff to acquire a Maltese passport. A connection between [...]

Two days from now a different magistrate will be hearing Repubblika’s arguments why Police Commissioner Angelo Gafà failed to act properly on evidence documented in a magistrate’s inquiry into Pilatus Bank. The new magistrate hearing the case is Claire Stafrace Zammit who replaces Nadine Lia who was removed from the case after the constitutional court [...]

Let’s not reduce the absurdity of Charles Polidano iċ-Ċaqnu’s sense of entitlement to Orwellian ovine oversimplifications of PN good Labour bad. He is one of the best cases for the argument that our political and democratic system is compromised by its dependence on construction tycoons whether because political parties and candidates depend on their funding [...]

Malta’s Constitution protects citizens from being discriminated against on grounds of race, place of origin, political opinions, colour, creed, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. But Malta has signed up to an international law that obliges it to do more than that. Protocol 12 of the European Convention Act says that no one shall be [...]

There are times when we are moved to sympathise with the attorney general, the chief prosecutor of the land. Her job is to fight crime, never a pleasant task. The resources at her disposal are necessarily less than the resources in the hands of the criminals she’s supposed to nab. She pays public service salaries [...]

So, this is the evidence, such as it is, that the hunters have to back their argument that Miżieb was destined to be theirs. In 2011, when Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici had been out of government for 24 years, the former prime minister typed out a letter so the hunters could prove that it had been [...]

I drove my daughter to school today because she needed to carry stuff that wouldn’t make sense on her daily school van. I’m a bad daddy when I’m driving my children, especially first thing in the morning. My thoughts wander and the children mostly give up on getting my attention long enough for anything like [...]

Decisions handed down today by Judge Lawrence Mintoff are important for several reasons. The decisions are of course about the enjoyment of the Miżieb woodlands by people not carrying a weapon. Just because hunters have a strong lobby does not mean they have any right to privileges unavailable to others and whatever ministers promised them [...]

An 11-year prison sentence was confirmed yesterday on a school bus driver who raped, twice, an 8-year-old girl entrusted to him to bring home from school. The violence occurred several years ago when the perpetrator was 24 years old. He threatened his victim, saying he would hurt her sister if she spoke out. On multiple [...]

There was some anticipation for the court hearing today in the case brought by Repubblika challenging the attorney general for her decision not to prosecute Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad and other crooks at Pilatus Bank. There were many reasons for the anticipation. The procedure is unprecedented because it is the result of very recent changes [...]

I was still writing my commentary on a decision by Judge Christian Falzon Scerri who overruled the attorney general’s plea to be exempted from testifying in the case brought by Repubblika for a judicial review of her decision not prosecute Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad and other crooks from Pilatus Bank, when we heard that Attorney [...]

The attorney general, Victoria Buttigieg, will tomorrow morning have to take the stand and answer Repubblika’s questions on her decision not to prosecute Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad and other people indicated by a magisterial inquiry for having committed crimes at and through Pilatus Bank. In another piece after another decision on another front of this [...]

Some weeks ago, a constitutional court was confronted with two versions of a single set of facts. One of the versions was expressed in a magistrate’s decree and the other contrasting version of the same facts was given to the upper court by one of the parties appearing before the same magistrate in a lower [...]

Robert Abela swept away his interviewer’s suggestion that he may consider nominating Lawrence Gonzi as the next president. The interviewer asked if the PM would consider “making” Gonzi president. Robert Abela should have seen through the trick question but it was too smart for him. Nowhere in our constitution is the power of “making” the [...]

Another Joseph Muscat acolyte has slept on a bench in Kordin, one more in a list far shorter than it should be. Sigmund Mifsud, Labour Party election candidate, was such a Joseph Muscat man that one time he organised a concert by the national orchestra curated to perform Muscat’s favourite songs. Because this is North [...]