Owen Bonnici has written a piece about culture. Or so he claims. In actual fact, it’s an advertising promo for Heritage Malta’s Heritage Passport and this is the only example of ‘culture’ he alludes to throughout, trumpeting its success with the words ‘let me remind you’. How could we forget when only two minutes ago, [...]
Sent in by someone known to me: If only I was Police Commissioner Laurence Cutajar. I would have interviewed Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri the day Panama Papers exposed their suspect newly formed and undeclared trusts and money laundering companies offshore. But I didn't. I could have got in NexiaBT’s Karl Cini to explain to [...]
As anyone would, I have my views on an inter-island tunnel. But that’s not what this blog post is about. As you might expect I have strongly held views on transport but because I worked in transport policy for some time I would rather avoid risking mixing issues here. This blog post is about what [...]
REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi This Reuters photo by Darrin Zammit Lupi of the vigil last Tuesday was used by a number of publications as the appropriately accompanying piece reporting on the Reporters Without Borders review of the current state of play in media freedom -- and how Malta's ranking has toppled since it became [...]
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Tuesday evening -- 40 hours before this post was written -- a vigil was held at the feet of the Great Siege Memorial in protest demanding truth and justice, 18 months after the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Our intrepid public cleansers have been since twice to wipe clean any hint of that protest. But [...]
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Call it authoritarianism, autocracy, dictatorship or just a rule of law in disguise; all members of the same family consistently gaining ground globally from the Americas to Europe to Asia. Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, Zuma, Duterte, Trump to mention a few. And yet Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, opines that even in [...]
It’s a funny old world where Magistrates-in-waiting feel the need to do some PR. But if you’ve been showered in consultancy contracts since the sun rose over Malta (to use a local idiom) in March 2013 you need to remind the world you exist beyond Chris Cardona’s grace and favour and your father-in-law Paul Lia’s [...]
Konrad Mizzi is asking the Constitutional Court to protect him from the government he works for. In a complaint to the Court he says the State should not be allowing anyone to ask for an inquiry into the Panama Papers. He says the procedure used by Simon Busuttil and separately by Repubblika allows people to [...]
Press Release by #occupyjustice: Castille Square was a sea of activists holding up portraits of Daphne Caruana Galizia, to mark eighteen months since the journalist’s brutal assassination, an action reminiscent of the scene from the movie Being John Malkovich. The activists, gathered behind the slogan #occupyjustice, converged in front of the office of the Prime [...]
The government is always warning us not to reach premature judgement. Was the drive-by shooting in Birżebbuġa last week a racially motivated crime? It is ‘irresponsible’ to answer that, we’re told, before such a thing is definitively ascertained by investigators. It’s only the last in a line of truth-dodging defense mechanisms put up by the [...]
Read this follow-up feature about Russian millionaires buying Maltese passports. The story by Anna Nemtsova includes comments by Ilya Shumanov, the deputy head of Transparency International’s bureau in Moscow that showed The Daily Beast a list of 582 Russians who have bought E.U. passports in Malta just since the beginning of 2018. The group has [...]
