Keith Schembri’s lawyers are having none of it. A phone that was held for safekeeping by a magistrate in a case against Keith Schembri vanished for a while only to reappear in another file which was not supposed to be in the magistrate’s office at all.
The brief disappearance of the phone is now being used by Keith Schembri’s lawyers in their campaign to make it inadmissible as evidence. Whatever ugly thing shows up in it, it could have been planted there during the phones brief absence, they say. It’s inadmissible.
How bloody convenient.
Keith Schembri had already lost a phone just before his arrest in 2019. Thank Christ our prime minister’s chiefs of staff do not get to walk around with nuclear codes. You wouldn’t want them to lose their notebook somewhere.
This time the police got to his second phone before he could accidentally misplace it. But Keith Schembri is a lucky guy. Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech’s drawers are porous and somehow phones leave the files they’re put in and holiday in unrelated files. The file the phone went on holiday to, is itself on holiday, somehow holding back from travelling to where it’s supposed to be.
Magistrate Frendo Dimech blames the messy administration of the court for the journey of the spontaneously ambulant dog and bone. The mess appears to have reached her back room.
There’s a lot of people professing anger at the disappearance and reappearance of Keith Schembri’s phone. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing and ears smoking with indignation and fury.
But there’s only one person who benefits from the mess: Keith Schembri. How bloody convenient.
Do they take us for idiots? Yes.