From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Fraud and forgery were a mainstay of Mossack Fonseca. It was their USP. Was this evaluated in the inquiry? ... Even if, for argument’s sake, the outcome of insufficient evidence to prosecute may be the right one, the Attorney General should consider exercising his discretion at law [...]
… said the wannabe diva. The soul-crushing climax of the Saviour Balzan interview with Michelle Muscat was, of course, the exhumation of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s remains for a crazed Sabbath dance choreographed by the interviewer and the interviewee. Then, with blood still dripping from her fangs, she went on to express surprise not everyone falls [...]
The government has been pushing the boundaries of its power for sometimes. During the last 8 months it has moved with unseemly haste to remove banners and posters of protest on baseless legal pretexts. A pair of such banners were raised by Daphne Caruana Galizia’s sons and husband asking “Why aren’t Keith Schembri and Konrad [...]
Not that it would ever occur to me to attend, but the misnomered August Moon Ball is on again tonight. And the odd tradition founded by President George Abela of dodging the August full moon to comply with the Muscats’ holiday plans continues. As the name implies, the idea initially was to have the [...]
Joseph Muscat visited the tomb of Francesco Buhagiar a predecessor of his in office who has been dead for 84 years. Nice little ceremony. The photographer had enough of an angle to picture the prime minister standing in front of the tomb but, oddly the prime minister stood on it to pay his respects. Quite [...]
It is only right that when Standard & Poor’s expresses concern about Malta’s banking sector, people in the financial services industry prick their ears. They should not be surprised. They have been close witnesses of what has been going on for some time. People who have to hunt every month know that the markets have [...]
The Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States is evaluating disciplinary proceedings against a Tel-Aviv company part-owned by Maltese-passport holder Anatoly Hurgin. Hurgin and Alexander Aurovsky are shareholders of Ability Inc. The SEC, which oversees securities transactions has been investigating Ability, which provides interception, geolocation and cyber intelligence products to security agencies. Anatoly Hurgin [...]
The Maltese Community Council of Victoria (MCCV) presented a posthumous award to Daphne Caruana Galizia for services to the broader Maltese community and her valuable contribution to democracy in Malta through her fearless investigative journalism. A statement by the MCCV commented that Daphne’s assassination "exposed the fragility of democracy in Malta". Truth, freedom of expression and [...]
Even if the guys at the Central Bank were dragged to their laptops in the middle of the night to mitigate S&P’s comments about the harm to the reputation of Malta’s banking sector, the damage is considerable. We should never make the mistake of blaming S&P. It would be no different to the government blaming [...]
Read this post by Matthew Mizzi on Facebook.
On my behalf Andrew Borg Cardona sent the following to the editor of NET TV in response to a report where they said I lied about the Opposition voting in favour of the cannabis law when I said no such thing. So far they haven't reported it. L-Editur NetNews Nikteb ghan-nom ta’ Manwel Delia b’riferenza [...]
“Il-blogger Manuel Delia mgiddeb” screams the Net headline giving me half my professional title presumably because I’m still unworthy of the prefix ‘biċċa’. In reporting a letter to this website from the party’s new lawyer Vince Galea, Net TV reports that I lied to my readers saying the PN Parliamentary Group voted in favour of [...]
Jaqueline Alexander was denied bail by a special Panama court while investigations into her involvement in money laundering are underway. The Egrant inquiry has relied on Jaqueline Alexander’s statement filed in Panama itself in order to refute the credibility of the documentary evidence presented to the inquiry that suggests that Michelle Muscat owned the secret [...]
One of the many confusions that need to be cleared up is that the Egrant inquiry was not requested by the prime minister as would have been his prerogative to do under the special law regulating inquiries. Instead, the prime minister, out of line of course, had the police chief request a magisterial inquiry with [...]
There isn’t much substance to Martin Scicluna’s article of today. He quips that any examination of the small fraction of the Egrant inquiry is the work of loony flat-earthers. He is amused by his joke and spends the next 1,000 words laughing at it. Incidentally, flat-earthers are people who take what they see at face [...]
The Egrant inquiry dismissed documentation showing Michelle Muscat’s alleged ownership of Egrant on the basis of declarations by a former Mossack Fonseca employee about the signatures appearing on it. Mossack Fonseca was notoriously indifferent to the signatures appearing on documents it processed. Consider the case of a Slovenian inspector who lost his job when a [...]
The big question still unanswered by the published fraction of the Egrant inquiry is, who owns Egrant? Documentation that may or may not have come by Aaron Bugeja cannot convincingly answer that. Indeed if he were convinced by any of it he’d have said so in the inquiry conclusions. But crucially nor can the testimony [...]
Jaqueline Alexander, whose response to a request from Aaron Bugeja’s inquiry into the ownership of Egrant, has been relied upon to disprove the validity of documents suggesting Michelle Muscat owned the secret Panama company, in 2015 signed a Power of Attorney in favour of a man who had at the time been dead almost two [...]
As is customary on this blog, replies are carried without comment. This was sent in last night by Vince Galea in response to a story I published here a few days ago. The Leader of the Nationalist Party and the Nationalist Party have been and are still against the cultivation of Cannabis in our country. [...]
The government were fuming with fury yesterday because a UK House of Commons inquiry cited this blog as a source of information. It got to the point where they made formal diplomatic representations with the UK government telling them to admonish their MPs (Labour, Tory and SNPs) for being so gullible as to take on [...]