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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Because the most important thing in your life right now is whether England will beat Croatia.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This is an extract from Rai Uno's Porta a Porta that covered Ivan Grech Mintoff's testimony in the courts about the massive Libya scam in which more than 80,000 visas are believed to have been "sold" from Malta's consulates in Libya to people willing to pay for them, including terrorists and militiamen. Read more on [...]

Malta's Labour office has contacted Maria Efimova to inform her Pilatus Bank has settled her outstanding salary from when she worked for three unpaid months as executive assistant to Ali Sadr. In the ironic turn of events, Pilatus Bank have effectively admitted Maria Efimova’s complaint against them was justified and she was indeed owed payment. [...]

Nexia BT — Mossack Fonseca (Malta) — Kasco Group. These are three dots in the orbit of Keith Schembri and his grand fraudulent scheme to cover illicit income, avoid paying taxes and use his public office for personal office. A fourth dot is MFSP, the four-partner investment agency that managed Keith Schembri’s British Virgin Islands [...]

It is truly awful how badly the leadership of the PN is handling itself. There’s clearly a stubborn bunker atmosphere, barking orders to mobilise formations that exist only on a map, taking comfort from self-serving flattery, and seeking solace in imaginary magnanimity from the enemy as traditional support is deemed unworthy of its leadership. I [...]

In the heat of the French Revolution, the leaders of that upheaval did not sit down to write a charter about the rights of French people. They wrote instead the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’. Universal rights is by no means a universal understanding of what citizenship should be about. But [...]