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The prime minister’s office and the prime minister’s wife gave Times of Malta statements that manage to sound both categorical and hopelessly vague at the same time. The newspaper offered the Abela couple the opportunity to comment about an internal assessment made by their bankers when Robert Abela ascended the throne. That internal report asked [...]

The private staff of ministers have access to influence on the conduct of the public’s affairs. The fact that ministers trust them should not be sufficient qualification. Ministers can’t know everything about their staff and the government should use the resources at its disposal to screen people it places in such positions. It is a [...]

This is going to feel like a cop-out though it’s not meant to be. I think the government is right to provide incentives, even monetary incentives, to encourage students to choose academic programs that yield a greater return to the economy. There are, no doubt, more reasons than merely wealth that should go into deciding [...]

Eddie Fenech Adami often repeated the phrase that ‘politics is a service’. He meant it in the Christian sense that politicians should remember that the power they are given is not for their reward but for the benefit of others. The more powerful you are, the more you need to remember that your function is [...]

Joseph Muscat told the Public Accounts Committee the European Commission knew all about the agreement his government had made with Azerbaijan’s gas company. The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation fact-checked that and the Commission told them it wasn’t true. Confronted by the Commission’s flat denial, Joseph Muscat pivoted. He could no longer say the Commission knew [...]

At his questioning in the PAC yesterday Joseph Muscat was asked by PN MP Darren Carabott about something I wrote in June 2018. Here’s a link to the piece where I reported that Keith Schembri received substantial amounts of money in January 2015 soon after returning from Azerbaijan. I had published that report around 5pm [...]

I have no way of fact checking the claims made by Arnold Cassola in his Times of Malta article. I am going to assume, for the purposes of this commentary, that all the facts he claims are accurate. The claims briefly: an unnamed individual, identified as Aziz, was born in a refugee camp in Palestine. [...]

Updated at 15:40 of 14 August 2023 An edition of the Government Gazette has issued a notice that Robert Abela is away and Chris Fearne is Acting Prime Minister. The notice is dated today but back-dated to yesterday when the prime minister was already away.   The authors of our constitution anticipated a very simple [...]

After a few squats in the trenches ministers have disappeared. They found themselves announcing too prematurely that the faults that caused the power cuts had been solved. They hadn’t. Power cuts are still the order of the day. The story of Mount Carmel patients left in the heat and the dark for hours would have [...]

So, Joseph Muscat was riled yesterday, poked by incessant questions from the chairman of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, Darren Carabott, insisting he would not be made a parrot, which is exquisitely ironic given the recent revelation that he was billing a parrot trading company more than ten grand a month for a slice of his [...]