Neville Gafà was always odd, even for Labour. Somehow his proximity to Keith Schembri and Joseph Muscat gave him incredible access to power, completely out of proportion with his abilities. He always seemed out of his depth and yet, somehow, he enjoyed access to all manner of schemes.
He was alleged to have taken massive kickbacks to process medical visas for Libyans injured in the war. The whistle-blower in that case was prosecuted instead of Gafà. Meantime the then government official sued a reporter for libel and approached the defendant’s witnesses, allegedly with a combination of bribes and threats. He lost the libel suit.
Despite this rather terrible form, he was dispatched to Libya as a government envoy, meeting ministers there as if he was one, and negotiating with warlords he claims he accidentally met in the street.
He was unceremoniously kicked out of government the day Robert Abela took over from Joseph Muscat but Abela brought him back when the prime minister wanted help finding accomplices who would help him push to Libya migrants lost at sea.
Neville Gafà took the last photographs of Daphne Caruana Galizia alive. The day before she was killed he stalked her and followed her as she shopped for gardening objects in a Sunday market. Just the behaviour you’d expect from a senior government official.
What ever happened to Neville Gafà?
Turns out that he is using his social media these days to peddle anti-EU pro-Putin propaganda. He carries disinformation content and disseminates anti-West venom at the service of the authoritarian Russian regime. No matter that Putin’s Russia invaded a sovereign country next door. Gafà’s page says it is the West that hates Ukraine. Putin loves Ukraine so much he rolled tanks in to make it his.
Perhaps I’m more sensitive to this than I should be this week because I’m in Lithuania for a meeting and here you can smell in the air the nervousness about the bear flexing next door.
But even without the benefit of icy proximity, you can see why this Neville Gafà Facebook page is utter madness. This guy would be considered a security threat in any Western capital and yet for years he had a desk in the prime minister’s wing of the Auberge de Castille. He conducted foreign policy for Malta, in war-torn Libya no less. He sat down for pow wows with warlords identified as war criminals by the UN and kept the content of those meetings secret.
He’s moved from Team Joseph Muscat to “#PutinTeam”. Some would say he never moved.
In the process his Facebook Page does a little propaganda for the brutally oppressive Iranian regime and he talks up the German far right AfD and why Germany should quit the EU.
A loony far right propagandist can be dismissed as harmlessly odd. Neville Gafà was a man on the inside. Perhaps he still is.
