AAS is not a hypocrite

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2023-02-17T07:28:39+01:00Fri, 17th Feb '23, 07:28|

Alex Agius Saliba voted for an EP resolution supporting military aid to Ukraine for as long as necessary. One other Labour MEP Josianne Cutajar voted for the resolution as well, while Alfred Sant and Cyrus Engerer were not in the room when the vote was taken. This Newsbook report points out that just a few [...]

Poor sod must be starving

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2023-02-16T09:01:52+01:00Thu, 16th Feb '23, 09:01|

That’s how we’d put it in Maltese. Mejjet bil-ġuħ. I criticised Robert Abela and his government for changing the law to remove the cross-party consensus requirement to appoint the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life. I called the action anti-democratic, a regression on governance standards that in this country are too low to begin with. [...]

Rule Number Five

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2023-02-16T07:56:38+01:00Thu, 16th Feb '23, 07:56|

Karl Cini thinks he’s made. He knows all the five rules. He is obedient and loyal, that’s one and two. He’s a stand-up guy so he’s got honour in the bag. And he’ll be damned if he’s not proud of his work. Rule number five for the wise-guy is silence. It’s the sacred oath of [...]

Medical intimidation

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2023-02-16T12:14:10+01:00Thu, 16th Feb '23, 07:16|

I want to join the chorus of support for the editor of Malta Today, Matthew Vella, who is being bullied by the owners of the Steward hospitals for doing his job as a journalist and letting us know, as best as it is possible to know, who is making money on the back of our [...]

Box ticked

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2023-02-15T16:31:31+01:00Wed, 15th Feb '23, 16:31|

A consultation meeting was held today, called by the Committee of Experts the government appointed 13 months ago to make recommendations on how to implement recommendations by the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry to protect media freedom in Malta. Let me just briefly remind you how we got here. Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered on 16 [...]

‘Reforming Malta’s Media System’, Borg and Comodini Cachia

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2023-02-14T10:07:57+01:00Tue, 14th Feb '23, 09:56|

Joe Borg and Therese Comodini Cachia launched yesterday their latest book, published by MidSea Books, an exercise in completion, gathering in one place the sources that are needed to measure a gap in the regulatory framework that governs the press in Malta, how it falls short of doing the job of guaranteeing media freedom, and [...]

THE SUNDAY TIMES: The future crumbling

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2023-02-13T07:12:38+01:00Mon, 13th Feb '23, 07:12|

From my article in The Sunday Times: "Holding the Labour government to account feels futile when people who agree it should go can’t imagine themselves replacing it. You will, no doubt, ignore the fake tears of the occasional Labour Party leader bemoaning the poor state of the PN and regretting the harm to democracy because [...]

The cable is nazzjonalist

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2023-02-11T07:33:56+01:00Sat, 11th Feb '23, 07:32|

I’m going to go against the grain here, perhaps, but I don’t consider a 45-minute power cut during a storm of the scale we experienced over the past few days as a major national crisis. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the infrastructure to falter under the pressure of exceptional weather conditions that are so [...]

Read this

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2023-02-10T08:07:18+01:00Fri, 10th Feb '23, 08:07|

If you follow the work of Repubblika or this blog, you will have heard us complain that every time we start a process in court, we are forced to prove we have an interest in the case we are pursuing. Interest, in a legal sense, is relevant when you’re going to court because of an [...]

Blurring the lines

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2023-02-08T16:54:40+01:00Wed, 8th Feb '23, 16:54|

There is supposed to be a clear division of labour between the political bosses of a government, and the civil service employees who work for them. The political bosses make policies and drive them forward. The civil service, while ambivalent about those policies, is expected to do its best to put them to work. Whilst [...]

Basic instincts

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2023-02-06T09:58:16+01:00Mon, 6th Feb '23, 09:47|

I wasn’t a witness to the conversations that mattered but I was close enough to hear the whispers. After years of struggle and pointless controversy Malta was on the eve of a referendum that would decide whether the country would join the EU. Those of us in favour of joining had spent little time over [...]

Sadr’s case against Malta suffers setback in New York

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2023-02-04T08:03:24+01:00Sat, 4th Feb '23, 08:03|

A US federal judge has thrown out a request by former Pilatus Bank owner Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad’s Hong Kong company to force the CEO of a US consultancy company to surrender her correspondence with the Maltese banking regulator on recruiting a “competent person” to take over Pilatus Bank. Ali Sadr’s Alpene Limited asked a [...]

The mafia’s professor

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2023-02-03T13:39:12+01:00Thu, 2nd Feb '23, 19:44|

I lost on appeal a libel suit filed against me by Raphael Vassallo who was offended – and a court found he was libelled – by an observation I made that a journalist who gives the false impression that the mafia does not exist would, whether they realised it or not, be helping the mafia, [...]

The unquestioned plot

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2023-02-01T17:45:16+01:00Wed, 1st Feb '23, 16:38|

It’s been almost 2 years since one of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s killers publicly said for the first time that he knew of an earlier plot that came to nothing to kill the journalist. Vince Muscat il-Koħħu was two years ago answering questions from Jason Azzopardi in court where he spoke about driving another one of [...]

On magistrates sending signals

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2023-02-01T14:36:27+01:00Wed, 1st Feb '23, 14:36|

Robert Abela has been pressuring judges and magistrates to hand down harsher penalties for crimes. He’s said people are disappointed by the courts and it is thanks to their lacklustre performance and their lenient attitude that he’s scared to let his daughter walk the streets alone. He said judges and magistrates should stop giving light [...]

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