Bernard Grech was spot on yesterday. The 10th anniversary of Labour’s coming to power marks a decade where the basic rules of conduct in government were systemically ignored and where politics stopped being a process of driving change in the interest of the public good and became instead a process of serving the interests of [...]
This is a place where you come to mourn democracy. Like Orwell’s Benjamin the donkey I bray about my memory of earlier times, when I was younger and the sun shone brighter, though it got less hot. When I speak of political violence I was vaguely aware of in my childhood and of the EU-membership [...]
'When They Come Undone', a 2020 co-production of Repubblika, #occupyjustice, and manueldelia.com, was awarded the Best Editorial or Opinion Piece Award at the first IĠM Awards to be held in three years recognising the best journalistic works between 2020 and 2022. The jury panel which selected the film that won this category reported that "there [...]
You know how Joseph Muscat says he welcomes scrutiny into the hospitals swindle? Let me tell you what that means. It does not mean that if we’re able to dig deeper in that contract we’ll find nothing untoward. It means rather that the deeper the dig, the smellier the shit, and the more people are [...]
I don't know if Chris Fearne reads this blog but he should add blogs to his reading list. In this interview from May 2016 he tells The Malta Independent he doesn't read "blogs with no evidence" in reference to Daphne Caruana Galizia's Running Commentary. https://youtu.be/fBlM3epgsvI Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Maybe if he read [...]
Joseph and Michelle Muscat went to a church in Rabat yesterday. Mid-week mass may be unusual for some but not for our former first couple. It's unclear from the pictures whether they were wearing North Face, Gucci, or Louis Vuitton. No matter the clothes their place in paradise is assured. They were welcomed yesterday in the [...]
Joseph Muscat was irritated by Robert Aquilina’s visit to his state-provided office this morning. Nobody likes to be told their proper place is serving time. But if Robert Aquilina said Pope Francis’s place was in prison, the absurdity of the notion would be such that Pope Francis would ignore it. Replace Pope Francis with anyone [...]
Read this report of a court decision by Judge Joanne Vella Cuschieri yesterday that found that landlords of three interconnected properties in Isla are victims of the state because they have not been allowed to enjoy their property. The court has ordered the state to compensate them for their suffering. The report will give you [...]
Ministers yesterday needed to somehow emerge as winners after a court ruled that they had behaved in a way that does not fit anyone with the country’s interests at heart. (That’s what the court called them, using a descriptor for a dictionary term the court could have opted for: fucking traitors). Ministers needed to live [...]
For two hundred and eighty weeks we have had to go on without the benefit of your presence, without your unwilling leadership, without the trust you enjoyed of people who knew what was happening to us which you repaid with your life. You would have chuckled at the irony of the events of the last [...]
The following is a statement by #occupyjustice: Today, #occupyjustice inaugurated a monument to commemorate the sole contribution to the people of Malta of the Oxley Group, Vitalis/Bluestone, Vitals Global Healthcare and Steward Healthcare in collusion with the Maltese Government and its operatives. It is a representation of the only investment that was made out of [...]
There’s a lot of chatter, which I have sought to ignore, about people taking credit not due to them or refusing to give credit where it is due when talking about Friday’s massive court decisions. I think a discussion on credit is secondary to the substance of the matter and as readers of this blog [...]
Chris Fearne doesn’t want to go down in this storm. This is not just the desire for power or the fear of losing it. It is also because he is absolutely convinced he is innocent of the Steward catastrophe even if everyone else within smelling distance of the health ministry is guilty as a dog [...]
It would be amusing had the consequences not been so serious, to see Steward’s reaction to a court decision that found they extorted money that did not belong to them, they enriched themselves unlawfully at the expense of citizens, that their behaviour is worthy of condemnation, that they showed contempt for their obligations, for the [...]
The government is in crisis. They feel the pull of gravity, the weight of Joseph Muscat around their ankles, the free fall into perdition that is in their future. They are clutching at proverbial straws and ditching metaphorical ballast. Robert Abela, Byron Camilleri, Silvio Schembri, Aaron Farrugia, Ian Borg, Clint Camilleri, Julia Farrugia Portelli, Clifton [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Since the second rule of law report, the European Commission asked every year a simple question: what progress has Malta achieved in improving things since the last report? They put the question to the government and ministers make colourful presentations proclaiming bold reforms, claims peppered with “unprecedented” [...]
One of the elements of the complex Electrogas scandal was that the promise that the “investors” made that they would bring money into the country to invest in a new power station did not materialise. Their money partner, Gasol, went bust and yet the government didn’t fire them. Instead, the government leaned on Bank of [...]
Yesterday’s court decision to reverse a concession of public land and public property to a private consortium came at the end of a judicial review process provided for in the law governing the disposal of public land. First: how can public land be given away? The answer is through one of two ways. Either Parliament [...]
If Adrian Delia has not done a useful thing in his life – and that, it should be said, is rhetorical – he has today, and in the five years leading up to today’s court decision, done the nation a great service. Even the government must secretly be grateful. But the fact that today everyone [...]
