This too is corruption. Not the bribes in a brown envelope sort of corruption. But the sort of corruption where institutions are destroyed, checks and balances knocked down and the complete hold of the executive on every branch of government is so blatant that barely anyone bats an eyelid anymore. Opposition MPs Claudette Buttigieg and [...]
Arkady Babchenko is yet another journalist killed right outside his home. He left his apartment in Kiev to buy bread and was shot several times in his back by a killer who waited outside for him. His wife found him bleeding outside there door. He died in the ambulance. Arkady Babchenko was living in Kiev [...]
Busy Mater Dei medical professionals are taking up duties in Gozo to keep the hospital there in business bridging the gap until doctors are recruited permanently for the hospital there. I have spoken to Martin Balzan of the Medical Association of Malta who clarified who will be taking up duties in Gozo in the current [...]
Matthew Caruana Galizia: "Once your break down institutions, and capture them and destroy them in order to enable your own corruption you let in the door everything else, all the other bad stuff in the world. It's like inverting the Pandora's Box. This is what's happened. So, of course, as long as there's impunity and [...]
A company owned by the prime minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri was awarded two huge plots of land in the Bulebel Industrial Estate days before his boss, prime minister Joseph Muscat called a general election in 2017. The plots of land were granted for a 65 year lease starting 1st March 2017. One of [...]
The reaction to any blog post or article that is critical of the PN from a source of information that is habitually critical of Joseph Muscat’s government is as predictable as it is sad. It’s not that an opinion that is expressed that is in some way controversial or challenging should not expect to be [...]
See this episode of Metropolis, the first feature of which explores the contradictions of a European Capital of Culture that tries its best to ignore that a journalist has been killed. This is the French language version.
Maria Efimova spoke to me about how a man she does not know ran alongside her on her morning run near where she lives and told her ‘you know you are going to die’. Maria Efimova was taking her morning run along the beach close to her home in Crete when she had this brief [...]
Adrian Delia has caught up with his outstanding taxes and paid his tax debts off after disposing of assets he used to hold and does not hold anymore. He has given a detailed account of this to David Lindsay of The Malta Independent on Sunday who was shown documentation some of which is publicly available [...]
The fate of the Gozo General Hospital has been hanging in the balance since the government decided to abdicate its public responsibility to ensure the provision of overnight health services on Gozo and ‘sold it’ to someone else. The national health service — the obligation of the state to provide excellent health services to everyone [...]
Chris Cardona’s travel calendar makes fascinating reading. He is really that rare breed of minister whose memoirs you actually look forward to and hope they are the most sincere thing he’s ever written, which in his case is a very low benchmark. Relying on the information he gave Parliament about his travel over the last [...]
Is it not fascinating that Minister Chris Cardona often travels on his own on official duty? Given that he spends tens of thousands on these trips it is not likely that he travels alone to save money to the public purse doing away with the accompanying stage hand. First of all there's the many trips [...]
Ali Sadr is having his first taste of freedom after two months in lock-up in New York where he is indicted for multiple charges of bank fraud and sanctions busting. The story was broken in Malta in a Matthew Vella report on Malta Today who had it confirmed by a member of Ali Sadr's legal [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Journalism cannot alone bring about political change. The facts are not enough to silence lies. Truth is not a devastating weapon that wipes out iniquity and plants the seeds of justice in its place. Whistle-blowers do not scare bosses. Consequence is not outside the control of the [...]
I’m with the President on this one. It doesn’t matter what she thinks about the executive actions she is asked to sign. She has to sign them. There is no way she can refuse. This is why I completely disagree with people who think of the President as some form of saviour of last resort [...]
Perhaps value for money audits by the National Audit Office can start even before a project is commissioned rather than 7 years after it’s completed. Yesterday I commented on the auditor’s report on Mater Dei, the principle finding of which was that insufficient documentation is available to determine whether things were done properly. We have [...]
Looks like Triton Fountain needs some maintenance already. It was relaunched with (well deserved) fanfare just a few weeks ago. Something's wrong with it, it seems. Perhaps the naked man in the tray left something behind?
Who even has these ideas? Minister Michael Falzon, the fireworks afficionado whose political career somehow survived the Gaffarena scandal, told MP Karol Aquilina today 2,000 elderly residents of geriatric state institutions are now the proud owners of rosary beads blessed by the Pontifex Maximus himself. He was replying on behalf of his assistant, Tony Agius [...]
The National Audit Office investigated the construction of the Mater Dei Hospital. I use the word ‘investigated’ because they did. Investigation may have been their intent but at least in so far as the report repeatedly finds huge gaps in the information the office managed to gather, what the report appears to have determined is [...]
