Once again Nexia BT, the firm of the prime minister's accountant at the heart of the Panama scandal, will not be answering questions of a second European Parliament motion to Malta. Brian Tonna is citing professional secrecy. Let us be clear. Technically he is correct. An accountant is not even allowed by law to confirm [...]
This is a statement by independent Azerbaijan journalists organisation Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety. They list the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia in a list of crimes perpetrated against journalists who investigated the Azerbaijani regime: Azerbaijani Authorities Should Put an End to Impunity for Crimes against Journalists The Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety [...]
Yet another Labour Minister conflates government with parliament. Michael Farrugia today claims he is protected by parliamentary privilege from the criticism of a family that has lost their wife and mother to political assassination six weeks ago and have seen nothing from the government except signs of an orchestrated attempt to cover up what really [...]
Etienne Grech has been crowned "Il-Ministru tas-Sawt" an extra-constitutional honorofic which the Labour government appears to reserve to the more embarrassing in its ranks. His predecessor Silvio Parnis was no Nobel laureate. But if half the army got promoted before the last election and the other half got medals for being there, why shouldn't the [...]
Compare what goes on in this polity, where state, government and party are indistinguishable and like something from the council of Nicaea that indivisible trinity is personified in Joseph Muscat, and other normal democracies. A policeman whistle-blower in Ireland clear his throat to accuse the force that employed him of corruption. To cover themselves his [...]
The government has been awarding itself medals for faint praise it has received for the new press law it is piloting through parliament. International rights organisations have expressed relief that the draconian proposals the government first put forward have been partially withdrawn after the opprobrium they raised. The sense of relief that the fascist disaster [...]
In the interview he gave us, Jonathan Ferris spoke of his involvement in the Libya visa scam investigations. He described a container of documents being delivered to him and a bunch of policemen reporting to him sifting through heaps of paperwork. Until they gave up and were taken off the case to investigate something else. [...]
Yesterday’s parliamentary question from Godfrey Farrugia asking the prime minister whether the government was considering accepting crypto-currencies to sell passports was a smart question indeed. He got an unambiguous response from the prime minister. “No” the government is not planning to sell passports for bitcoins. Why is the question significant? Vanuatu is a micro-state that [...]
Here's the third part of an interview Ellen Trapp of German ARD TV and myself had with whistle-blower Jonathan Ferris where he speaks on why he thinks the Attorney General has tried to silence him and why he was fired unfairly. He also speaks on why he thinks there has been a cover-up to suppress [...]
Admittedly he's not known for being the sharpest knife in the drawer. But I have not heard any of Etienne Grech's colleagues correct him for letting slip what in their heart of hearts the Labour government feel about our democracy. Labour MP Etienne Grech yesterday declared that in his view there was "too much freedom [...]
Norman Lowell went on a trip to Bavaria on what he describes as a "spiritual and political pilgrimage". He peered from the mountain top views enjoyed by his "hero" Adolf Hitler. Then he posed with a bust of Adolf Hitler and smiled inanely like some people pose with a wax replica of the pope at [...]
This is the second part of the interview I and Ellen Trapp of German ARD TV did to Jonathan Ferris. In this portion of the Ferris Tapes, Jonathan Ferris speaks of how an attempt was made by the authorities to involve him in an effort to discredit whistle-blower Maria Efimova who first spoke of payments [...]
Keith Schembri should accept the invitation of the European Parliament’s delegation coming to Malta this week to answer their questions on what he knows about corruption and money laundering. He has already twice dodged the PANA committee on two visits, causing embarrassment to the his boss the prime minister, the government he leads, the party [...]
By Godfrey Leone Ganado, who here reminds us of the many outstanding questions on the third Panama company and asks some new ones. The two declarations of trust dated 20 August 2015, which were in the kitchen-safe at Pilatus Bank as alleged by whistle-blower Maria Efimova, are both allegedly held by the subscribers to the [...]
I interviewed Jonathan Ferris about his experience investigating corruption and money laundering at the Police and the FIAU from which he was summarily dismissed. In this first part of the interview, Jonathan Ferris speaks of direct Ministerial interference in police investigations and of resource starvation for investigations into crimes committed by high profile people in [...]
Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports the German federal procesutor is passing to the Malta police all information connected to Malta in some 3 terabytes of data from Mossack Fonseca servers purchased from an unknown source and leaked separately earlier in 2017, over a year after the ICIJ leaked the Panama Papers. The Munich prosecutor spent 2 million [...]
William Lewis, Segretarju Organizzattiv of the Labour Party, and recently commissioned by direct order for government works in Birżebbuġa is a veteran beneficiary of architectural engagements of government work without the bother of a competitive process to allow others better than him at the job a chance to make an offer. The quality of his [...]
I wrote yesterday how Malta Today carried an endorsement of Malta’s passport scheme from a Peter Vincent, introduced to the reader as a lawyer at Thomson Reuters. I also wrote how Malta Today did not inform readers, Peter Vincent resigned in a major scandal in the US federal immigration agency he was lead lawyer in [...]
From my The Sunday Times article today: "As with the counter-intuitive Brexit vote, the institutional collapse in Kenya, the breakdown of the Opposition in Grenada and other micro-States, explanations of the political realities of Malta on the back of conventional voting behaviour analyses are becoming insufficient. Nothing is what it seems when the real decisions [...]
Interviews carried today by London's The Times with Jonathan Ferris and Maria Efimova show just how whistle-blowers are made to feel by the government of this country. It is clear that the intimidation campaign against journalists in Malta, culminating in the explosive annihilation of Daphne Caruana Galizia, were addressed to sources who provide information to [...]