With a tie like that …

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2018-07-13T09:19:11+02:00Fri, 13th Jul '18, 09:19|

I kick myself as I do this. I'm qualified to be no one's image consultant. If I were, I'd do well to be my own. But have you seen Owen Bonnici's tie as he was running the gauntlet in Leeuwarden yesterday? Did he think it would disarm the artists in the audience?

Reputational laundry

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2018-07-13T09:01:19+02:00Fri, 13th Jul '18, 09:01|

Hugo Chetcuti died from complications from the wounds he suffered in a stabbing attack a few days earlier. And on cue the outpouring of grief on social media. Some with the obvious: he didn’t deserve to die this way. Of course not. No one does. No one is qualified to dispense death as judgement on [...]

TVM’s limited view: who’s checking?

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2018-07-12T16:34:57+02:00Thu, 12th Jul '18, 16:34|

The Malta Independent is right to raise the alert here about TVM ignoring the European Banking Authority’s statement that the FIAU allowed Malta’s financial system to serve crime. The fact that TVM went on to report the FIAU’s puerile reply is just the sort of idiotic bias we expect. But though we expect this sort [...]

Jonathan Ferris must be compensated

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2018-07-12T09:35:17+02:00Thu, 12th Jul '18, 09:35|

The findings of the European Banking Authority that ruled the FIAU broke the laws that give it its responsibility to prevent the use of the financial system to serve crime, independently confirm Jonathan Ferris’s case. Jonathan Ferris worked at the FIAU for a few months before he was fired from his job. It was when [...]

Constitutional Court finds Judge Antonio Mizzi’s refusal to recuse himself from hearing the Panama Papers appeal breaches Simon Busuttil’s rights: which means your rights

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2018-07-12T09:29:29+02:00Thu, 12th Jul '18, 09:27|

The Constitutional Court today found that Antonio Mizzi's refusal to recuse himself from hearing Joseph Muscat's appeal from a court order to have him and the Panama Gang investigated by the police is a breach of Simon Busuttil's fundamental rights. Simon Busuttil comes into this because he filed the complaint to the court that the [...]

Silence falls

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2018-07-12T07:26:27+02:00Thu, 12th Jul '18, 07:26|

The government has not yet reacted to a European Banking Agency report that Malta’s FIAU broke EU law on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purpose of money laundering and terrorist financing. There’s obviously an FIAU Press Release, a pathetic excuse at a response expressing ‘disappointment’ in the EBA’s decision [...]

Starving

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2018-07-11T10:08:44+02:00Wed, 11th Jul '18, 10:08|

This is from Nickie Vella de Fremaux's public Facebook page. From two days ago.   Starved but not hungry. What of? Attention? Air? Abiogenesis? Madam you're in the big league now. Try to act the part.

Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.

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2018-07-10T18:03:44+02:00Tue, 10th Jul '18, 18:03|

I suppose, for some, a football World Cup with England in the final four and Italy outside the starting 36 is enough evidence of civilisational collapse. But even thinking that is like starting a funereal eulogy with a joke and getting no chuckles.  Even in the glory of summer, the free flowing beer, the football, [...]

G Leone Ganado: What’s a PEP?

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2018-07-10T06:18:05+02:00Tue, 10th Jul '18, 06:18|

Godfrey Leone Ganado here reacts to the government's appeal from a court order to have Justine Caruana's husband, Silvio Valletta, run the investigation, such as it is, into the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The first court ruled Silvio Valletta is "politically exposed" which is a polite way of saying he sleeps with someone who is heavy invested in the [...]

Hey Saviour, I’m back!

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2018-07-09T18:26:32+02:00Mon, 9th Jul '18, 18:26|

Saviour Balzan appears to have missed me while I was away. In an unsigned piece on Illum of a couple of Sundays ago he expressed his anguish that he wasn't seeing new posts on this website. Must have been a long couple of weeks for him. Really one finds one has admirers in the unlikeliest [...]

Covering stab wounds

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2018-07-09T18:05:08+02:00Mon, 9th Jul '18, 18:05|

This The Malta Independent editorial is exasperated with PN media coverage. It compares it to propaganda from Russian communist times which is fair to say is not intended as praise. Now the PN has had its own media for many decades. Its newspapers have distributed the party’s voice and never pretended to be anything but [...]

GUEST POST: A fool’s paradise

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2018-07-09T09:31:13+02:00Mon, 9th Jul '18, 09:31|

Sent in a few days ago. Written by someone known to me: Some days I awake to thoughts of  "what would it have been like had the Mossack Fonseca servers not been hacked?"  Imagine. 17 Black, Hearnville, Tillgate and Egrant would have no meaning, no import, nada, exacto nada.  Panama would have remained that distant [...]

Saved from the waters

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2018-07-09T06:10:53+02:00Sun, 8th Jul '18, 20:35|

Yes she after all might mean well, though we’re entitled to doubt that. But there has never been a more insensitive time for the prime minister’s wife to go on a swim and take with her enough security detail and press cameras to launch a new lunar landing. We now have a very complicated relationship [...]

Keep your trousers on

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2018-07-08T08:53:46+02:00Sun, 8th Jul '18, 08:53|

I’m not sure if Joseph Muscat is into historical analogies but when people go into Napoleonic psychosis they do tend to twist little details they remember from their history and transform them into prophesies predicting their own glory. Either because of that or because Joseph Muscat has been having a special sort of dream at [...]

THE SUNDAY TIMES: Trenches in the mud

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2018-07-08T20:45:06+02:00Sun, 24th Jun '18, 08:00|

From my article in The Sunday Times: "As accusations of treachery are handed out in fury, the party leader himself shows unhelpful ambivalence when, for example, the government makes a fresh attempt to promote Consuelo Scerri Herrera and reward her with a judgeship, showing remarkable contempt for the institutions such as the reviewing committee that [...]

Inspector Big

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2018-06-20T11:05:33+02:00Wed, 20th Jun '18, 11:02|

That Sandro Camilleri guy gives me the creeps. For starters he’s a stereotype dressed as a self-fulfilling prophecy pretending to be proverbial. I know I’m the last person to give advice on physical appearance but those walnut crushing biceps of his are impossible to ignore on a ranking police officer. For remember he is that [...]

“You can’t handle the truth”

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2018-06-20T07:57:08+02:00Wed, 20th Jun '18, 07:54|

I don’t suppose anyone doubts anymore that the investigation of crimes with political ramifications is a politically controlled affair here in Malta. The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia does not merely have political ramifications. It is a political killing: the termination of a person to reach political ends, to serve political interests, commissioned by political [...]

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