Read this article in yesterday’s The Malta Independent by Professor Kevin Aquilina, who teaches and researches law at the university. He’s no big fan of Repubblika. A few days ago, he criticised our decisions about the Pilatus case where we anticipated possible court orders to discuss the evidence we had in hand behind closed doors, [...]

I’m sorry if I’m not letting go of this bone quite yet. Illum last Sunday screamed tabloid headlines that Repubblika “accepted” donations from applicants for citizenship despite its publicly and loudly declared objections to the scheme. In this other post I explained my wonder at how they reached that conclusion when they had no basis [...]

Scroll down for a copy of the letter Robert Aquilina sent today to an individual who had donated €1,500 to Repubblika last year. When last Sunday, we saw ourselves on Illum’s front page, accused of “accepting” a donation from someone who was looking to buy Maltese citizenship we were aghast. We felt guilty of the [...]

Read this first. You may have dismissed that piece of news as the collective moaning of a bunch of gamblers who gambled away their money and are trying to get it back, refusing to accept the stakes of their foolish playing. What follows is not a sob story about gambling addiction. The complaint to the [...]

A campaign intended to discredit Repubblika has started and its likely to get worse. The source of the campaign is not obvious and that’s not just because the hand throwing poison in the pot is cloaked. It’s also because many possible sources have motive and opportunity and it’s hard to figure out which one is [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "We know Abela told Reynders that Malta “learnt its lessons” and the reforms it is introducing are “game-changing”. But has it? Are they? "I can’t presume to know what the European Commission will say when its report is out. But last year’s report is public and I’m [...]

You need to speak either French or German for this one. It's an ARTE documentary about online gaming which you may find interesting.

It’s bad enough to have to listen to the military rhetoric about sieges and invasions poured like hemlock in our ears by right wing populist politicians from the UK, France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Greece, and Malta to poison us with hatred for migrants desperately trying to reach Europe. It’s horrible. It normalises prejudice and dehumanises [...]

I don’t want to make World Press Freedom Day about myself. I’m just doing this to give a bit of near-home context to RSF’s findings that it is easier to be a journalist in Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, in Orban-smothered Hungary, in conflict-torn Burkina Faso, and in corruption-riddled North Macedonia, than it is to be a [...]

Malta’s failure to adopt the recommendations of the Daphne Caruana Galizia has forced the country’s press freedom ranking further down. The Reporters Without Borders’ world rankings published today on World Press Freedom Day rank Malta an abysmal 84th in the world. Greece is the only EU country with a ranking lower than Malta’s. Ireland and [...]

I get the notion of social justice through the redistribution of wealth. That’s what the welfare state is about. Tax those who have, to give to those who don’t. I also get the objection that you can overdo that policy. A government can raise so much tax as to suffocate the smooth chugging of an [...]

The European Commissioner responsible for justice, Didier Reynders, is in Malta for a couple of days. He’s mostly seeing ministers who are, judging by reports of the parts of his meetings that were held in public, telling him how Malta ‘learnt its lessons’ about good governance and now everything is working fine. He’s holding a [...]

The State Advocate Chris Soler complained to the Chamber of Advocates of having been humiliated by public statements uttered by Repubblika’s President Robert Aquilina. Aquilina was writing about his expectations of the behaviour of the state attorney and his client, attorney general Victoria Buttigieg, when the court was yesterday due to hear Repubblika’s arguments why [...]

Angelo Gafà denies covering up pre-emptive pardons to Pilatus Bank officials identified for prosecution by a magistrate. That’s despite the explicit evidence to the contrary published in Robert Aquilina’s new book. In internal email exchanges police officials debate what reasons they need to conjure to justify their decision to let the suspects walk. The only [...]

A man yesterday unfurled a banner at a safe distance from Parliament that asked for ‘Justice for Jean Paul Sofia’. He was held by the police and taken away for interrogation. He was later allowed to leave. The facts are those. He was not beaten by the cops. His body wasn’t thrown off a plane [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "They’re not worried. They’re serene. Just like Rosianne Cutajar. While they raped the national airline to exhaustion, they gave up half of our national health service to outside control. An American conglomerate is now using its patients as human shields, hostages, while it negotiates the most favourable [...]

Many voters today never knew a time when Maltese politics was enriched by the front-line participation of Alfred Sant. And the rest forget to be grateful that they no longer remember. His allegedly last hurrah yesterday on Andrew Azzopardi’s radio show was as pleasant as a premature exhumation. I’ll go through some of the more [...]

Look at that headline. The medical equivalent would be “Cigarettes add 5 years to your life expectancy, says health minister”. It’s not like we haven’t had an independent inquiry before. The Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry went well beyond criminal responsibility. Indeed, it stayed out of criminal responsibility because criminal responsibility is the competence of the [...]

The Russian Embassy in Malta issued a statement expressing outrage at TVM for giving a Nazi a platform to justify and glorify Adolf Hitler. No doubt I share the sentiment. “The interview mentioned is an example of the dissemination of pseudo-historical theories,” says the Russian Embassy statement. “The very fact of its appearance desecrates and [...]

Updated 21 April 2023, 10:37, with comments by Director of Tipster. Cologne police this morning raided the offices of Malta registered and licensed gaming company Tipster. The Cologne building was stormed as part of a number of raids in several German offices. German media reports almost 1,000 officers were involved in searches in locations through Bremen, [...]