Keith Schembri’s lawyers Edward Gatt and Mark Vassallo filed an application in the magistrate’s court this morning saying their client has been under arrest since the wee hours of this morning and he hasn’t yet been given a copy of the evidence against him or been allowed to speak to his lawyers yet. That must [...]
Last November, the Times of London published an article headed “The Island of Corruption” and alleged that Malta is “riddled with corruption and organised crime”. A study by Luca Ranieri of the Department of Law and Politics of Sant’Anna School in Pisa describes Malta as “a corrupting island in a corrupting sea.” He insists that [...]
At the Independence Day mass yesterday, Prime Minister Robert Abela had everyone cover their nose and mouth. He didn't personally put masks on people. But his government, the one he's the chief executive of, is telling us that whenever we're in the same room with people we don't live with day and night, we must [...]
The official government mouthpieces report the mounting death toll of the coronavirus epidemic in old people's homes with the plain ordinariness of cheap vanilla. We are told the dead were in their 70s, 80s or 90s suggesting that their lease was about to expire in any case. And a medical convenience has been coined reporting [...]
Of course, there’s no gratitude here for our institutions to have apparently risen out of their slumber and froze Keith Schembri’s accounts now when they should have done that four years ago. But we need to recognise, we have to recognise, that things have come much further than Keith Schembri ever imagined they would even [...]
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 [...]
Image by Steve Bonello Art & Illustration. Never mind your facial pruning, but it takes some barefaced cheek to sit in the very building where the Constitutional Court declared that you are a persistent human rights violator, and shamelessly lie about the motive behind your decision to order the cleansing of our makeshift [...]
At about 2pm on the Friday when he testified in front of the public inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, I put up this post on Facebook: The post was accompanied by a photo of the simpering minister, who our dashing PM, on his elevation from consultant to his predecessor to consultee to [...]
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.
This morning, the three judges composing the Board of Inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia took note of the vitriolic attack against them by Glenn Bedingfield and have included it in the proceedings. This is a just initiative by three persons who have been accepted by both the disgraced Joseph Muscat, on behalf [...]
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 [...]