This piece in the Daily Mail is intended to damage its real target – Tony Blair – by his association with two unsavoury characters Ilham Aliyev and Joseph Muscat. The Daily Mail dislikes Tony Blair for its own political reasons. It’s a fiercely pro-Brexit newspaper and Tony Blair’s objections to Brexit are an annoyance it [...]
Over the last 3 days Daphne Caruana Galizia published damaging reports on Frank Portelli’s and Adrian Delia’s outstanding debts with HSBC. Frank Portelli’s were long known. His St Philip’s Hospital has been out of business for years and he has been trying to flog it to the government since even before it closed its doors. [...]
Government is bidding hard for the relocation of the EU’s Medicines Agency from London – no longer a suitable home for an EU institution after Brexit – to Malta. Parliamentary Secretary Deo Debattista gave The Times some details about the concerns employees at the Agency are raising about Malta and how he might address them. [...]
The Times picked up a government legal notice that announces the President of Malta has been paid 478 euro in arrears after she got a pay rise below inflation rates for this year over the previous one. That’s her yearly weekend break in Sicily paid for then. Now our President earns the unpresidential sum of [...]
I don’t know what it is about Facebook that gets the worst out of people. I suppose it’s the almost total absence of inhibition. Also the false security that its infrastructure gives that hints at privacy where there is none. Watching people at each other’s throats over the choice of the next party leader is [...]
An Education Directorate internal report seen by The Times gives background on truancy from compulsory education. The newspaper’s headline is on the low recovery rate from fines imposed on parents whose children missed too much school. Since this is hardly about public revenue – we are not talking about the government failing to collect capital [...]
The pain of despair is palpable and transparently visible among some of the PN voters in the upcoming elections for a new party leader. They’re looking for the man, for there is no woman who would be chosen, that could beat Labour and they’re not entirely sure what would be necessary to achieve that feat. [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today. (Link to full article here). "We have an administration utterly and completely bereft of foresight and an electorate inebriated by the borrowed surplus of the here and now: borrowed, of course, against a future no one is planning for. "The bursting of bubbles is the reckoning of debts, [...]
The witness who is believed to have testified that a Panama company in the name of the prime minister's wife received millions in funds that cannot be legitimately explained is nowhere to be found and appears to have left the country. It should not be surprising the poor woman caught in the vortex of the worst [...]
Chris Cardona and Chris Fearne want to tell the PN how to run its affairs. Bugger off, won’t you? There has been plenty of analysis into the PN’s electoral loss. The PN has been examining its conscience like Joseph of Arimathea perhaps taking on more auto-flagellation than it really deserved. No one benefits from all [...]
I can understand the Chamber of Advocates’ stern reservations on Simon Busuttil’s request that Judge Antonio Mizzi should not be hearing Joseph Muscat’s appeal against a lower court’s decision to order an investigation into the Panama Papers. But I can understand Simon Busuttil as well. To coin a phrase, justice must be seen to be [...]
Marlene Farrugia has openly lamented she is ineligible to run for the leadership of the PN. This in spite of the fact she is the leader of her own party, which she has only very recently founded and on behalf of whom she has secured the first viable pre-electoral alliance in Maltese political history … [...]
The witty title is not original. Credit to Lou Bondi writing some time in 1997 on the same Frank Portelli who was being a prick at the time. Some things do not change. When a candidate for party leadership says idiotic things (see here a MaltaToday report of Frank Portelli's notions) the reaction is not [...]
Pakistan’s Supreme Court has just disqualified the Prime Minister there, Nawaz Sharif, from holding public office because his children held secret accounts stashed abroad revealed by the Panama leaks of 2015. There are no fine points or subtle distinctions. What Sharif is accused of is identical to what Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are accused [...]
The reason why we have courts is they get to hear all sides of the story before deciding on someone’s guilt. So it is unwise, albeit very tempting, to reach conclusions from a newspaper report of a day in court. But this The Malta Independent report of the case against Khalen Ben Nasan who blew [...]
Party leadership elections are by definition introspective and bloody affairs. It is hard to imagine our political system surviving the harsh primaries of the American, and latterly the French system, were an open and unseemly battle is fought by hopefuls suffering wounds in the campaign to get their party’s nomination, which they’ll then have to [...]
When Alfred Sant prepared for the 1996 campaign his imported US advisors told him truth was what he made of it. If he repeated a lie often enough, no matter how fanciful, he could change that lie into truth. Sant’s most famous apprentice was Joseph Muscat, who spent a dozen years on TV conjuring all [...]
This report of the goings on at the AFM in the days before the last general election makes grim reading. Superficially this is about the government abusing of its incumbency to secure its re-election. Certainly as back-dated promotions and big fat cheques for arrears were being dished out, foremost on the government’s mind was exactly [...]
In Westminster whips hand out to their party colleagues the agenda of the following week’s parliamentary business highlighting the expected ‘divisions’ or votes expected that week. Not all votes are equally important. The ranking of the importance for the party is illustrated simply by how many times the agenda item is underlined. One line and [...]
See this report of the Developers’ Association’s statement on what’s going on in SmartCity. The gist of it is that it was ok for government to transfer land to a developer (the Emirati owners of SmartCity) to build a job-creating business park. It was even tolerable to accept that some of that land would be [...]