We are of course entitled to feel bitterness. The court order to freeze Keith Schembri’s assets handed down yesterday, was as many entirely correct commenters observed, four years late. Read this pertinent piece by Jacques Rene Zammit on that. There was already enough to justify what happened yesterday when the Panama Papers emerged. Our sanity [...]
The Attorney General has obtained a court order today to freeze all assets of Keith Schembri, Joseph Muscat's former chief of staff. The order includes his wife, parents and family, all the companies he owns in the Kasco Group, Brian Tonna of Nexia BT and several staffers at the accountancy firms. The court issued the [...]
The Council of Europe rapporteur monitoring the government’s conduct in the aftermath of the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia told Prime Minister Robert Abela today that if he persists on shutting the public inquiry in December he’d be “violating the principle of separation of powers that is fundamental to the rule of law.” He also [...]
If in doubt, eat Roly Poly.
Julia Farrugia Portelli has shifted gears away from her campaign to open Malta for mass parties and the free exchange of covid infections. She is now campaigning against a planned application to develop a horse paddock in the valley that separates Rabat from Mtarfa. Horse paddocks, if you really need to have any, must presumably [...]
I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I like – Oscar Wilde Robert Abela, after a two-month honeymoon of a premiership with photo opportunities aplenty, faced his first ever real test. This happened to be the coronavirus. Admittedly nobody would have liked to step into his boots. The first wave [...]
I suspect some people expected the PN leadership due diligence process to rule out Adrian Delia from running. I certainly thought it could have, but would not for the political expediency of having him defeated more definitively in the ballot box rather than by a committee of faceless men. But having read the report, I [...]
The judge who presided the trial of Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad has criticised harshly the US prosecutor’s office for hiding evidence that should have properly been passed to Ali Sadr’s defence team. The decision follows the withdrawal of charges against Ali Sadr by the US prosecutor earlier this year after his conviction in a court [...]
Dr Simon Mercieca B.A., B.A. (Hons), M.A., D.E.A. (Sorb.), Ph.D. (Sorb.), Senior Lecturer of History at the University of Malta, is a public health hazard. I don’t just say that. I’ll give my reasons for it. Yesterday he published this post saying the owner of Xejk TV banned the repeat broadcast of a TV show [...]
This week marks the 12th anniversary of a mass-shooting at a university in Finland. A 22-year-old student called Matti Saari, shot and killed ten people at the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences in Kauhajoki, Finland, with a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol. He died a few hours later in hospital having shot himself in the head. [...]
Read this earlier post first. Traditionally, the Attorney General could decide to secretly bury any inquiry and they owed no one an explanation for their decision. Our constitution used to say that in criminal matters the Attorney General is answerable to no one, an unqualified power that may have been abused to protect politicians who [...]
Let’s take a step back and recall the facts. On 24 April 2017, in the midst of the storm of stories about Egrant and its ownership, Daphne Caruana Galizia published a post headlined “BREAKING/Prime Minister’s chief of staff took kickbacks from Brian Tonna on sale of Maltese citizenship.” She had in an earlier report explained [...]
In the coming days the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation and Repubblika will be filing a lawsuit on the massive data leak scandal from last April. The legal initiative groups persons whose personal data was revealed through the data leak from the servers of the company C-Planet Solutions Limited and who are seeking justice for the intrusion. [...]
Owen Bonnici is testifying at the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry tomorrow. Maybe he'll explain why he censored on a daily basis the protest in Valletta calling for truth and justice for Daphne until a court declared he was breaching human rights and sowing division in the country. Or maybe he'll explain how he could be [...]
You see things; and you say, ‘Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw I woke up with a start. It had been raining heavily with frequent bursts of thunder throughout the night. It was chilly, so I put on a t-shirt and walked to the [...]
Updated at 12:12. Adds video in tweet from official Charles Michel account. I pay tribute to the memory of #DaphneCaruanaGalizia and I express my deepest sympathy to her family. What happened is a shame for the European values : the rule of law, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press. We need to [...]
Manuel Delia · Being Joseph Muscat Kenneth Rijock’s post from yesterday got a lot of attention. He quotes investigators saying Joseph Muscat is still effectively in charge of the government, running a system of patronage for people in office paying them in cash from proceeds of crime. Rijock reports Muscat is under investigation in the [...]
We met in Valletta today with required distances to keep each other safe but close enough to the Auberge de Castille to tell the wise monkeys in there we're still watching them. And hands off the Daphne inquiry. It must be allowed to work for as long as it needs to. The photos are by [...]
The rules about leadership of the PN in the amendments written into the statute some months ago had Adrian Delia in mind but not in the way things have turned out. The author of the changes intended to prevent another compromised cowboy, with baggage in his past that would weigh down the entire party, from [...]
On Keith Schembri, Chris Fearne said Joseph Muscat told him it was for him – the then prime minister – to decide about Keith Schembri’s fate. Not for cabinet, not for the parliamentary group, not for anyone but him. Chris Fearne speaks as if he accepted that. And he speaks as if he’s learnt the [...]