Yet another (alleged) mafioso walked out of the court building today free as a bird, protected from prosecution by yet another 'mistake' by the Attorney General's office. This one won't sue if I call him an (alleged) mafioso. John Spiteri is wanted by Italian prosecutors in connection with a large 'Ndrangheta drug trafficking operation. They [...]
The Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF) has ranked Malta among the riskiest jurisdictions in the EU and candidate countries for media freedom and restrictions on media pluralism. In an EU-funded study being published later today Malta is ranked “high risk”, the second worst possible category. The CMPF is a research and training [...]
The government will do its utmost to diffuse the significance of the most recent finding of the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life. The case concerns a supplement, a 32-page centrefold, inside the Labour Party’s Sunday newspaper marking two years since Robert Abela’s election and soft launching the Labour Party’s election campaign. The bottom-line cost [...]
We have slid down so far that we are reduced to hoping Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg is an incompetent, bungling idiot who has been promoted way beyond her dubious abilities because the only alternative horrifies us too much to say aloud: that she is a bespectacled tentacle of the mafia, a complicit agent of crime. [...]
When Nadine Lia was appointed magistrate, many warned there would be many occasions where her family ties would put her in conflict with her independence or, as a bare minimum, the public's perception of her independence. She's Paul Lia's daughter in law. Her father in law is the Labour Party's lawyer. He is a long-term [...]
The Nadur festa decorators were mighty indignant because people outside their pocket-sized universe mocked the canonisation of Joe Portelli, depicted as St John the Evangelist on one of their festa banners. The Nadurin football club fans reacted in a similar way after off-worlders found their public worship of Portelli distasteful. Joe Portelli gives them money [...]
Jean Claude Micallef is pitching for the job to run the association of premier league football clubs saying in a Facebook post (because that’s how job applications for senior executive positions are filed these days) words to the effect that he meant to rescue Maltese football from having “its reputation clouded”. I can tell you [...]
MFA President Bjorn Vassallo is under pressure to support Joseph Muscat’s candidature to the presidency of the association of elite football clubs, not least because the support of key Joseph Muscat allies was crucial for Vassallo’s election in 2019. Bjorn Vassallo owes his election to the top job in the football federation to key Joseph [...]
On Wednesday, the Economy Minister, Silvio Schembri, presented 2 resolutions to Parliament’s National Audit Committee concerning the Żonqor-SmartCity land deal with the American University of Malta, the AUM. Pertaining to Robert Abela’s ‘new vision’ for the ‘university’, this deal is described as ‘giving back the land’ to the people, the catch being that the land [...]
A few days ago, the shadow minister for home affairs, Joe Giglio, was asked questions on a radio show about his thoughts on Pilatus Bank, given that its owner and directors used to be his clients, and now he’s shadow minister speaking for a party that used to have the view that Pilatus Bank was [...]
UPDATED: 24 June 2022, 12:46 Yesterday I wrote a piece about the utterly baseless claim that “because of data protection laws,” the police cannot tell us about what happened to one of its most senior officers found by an independent inquiry to have suffocated corruption investigations. I wrote how privacy laws are misused to pervert [...]
Labour MPs sitting at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe tabled 10 amendments to a draft resolution calling on Malta to step up its reforms and 8 of them were thrown out by the Assembly in near unanimous votes. The MPs, Naomi Cachia, Chris Bonett, Romilda Baldacchino Zarb, and Cressida Galea, attempted to [...]
Photo: REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi Multiple sources in premier league football clubs have reported to this website receiving calls from Robert Abela’s staff to warn them against hiring Joseph Muscat as chief of the professional clubs’ association. OPM staff are reported to have told leaders of the footballing world that should they support Joseph [...]
Privacy laws exist to protect private people from the abuses of a government or authorities or people of power with access to information given to them for other purposes. Let’s take the obvious example. You tell your doctor you have a sexually transmitted disease you probably didn’t get from your husband. You must tell her [...]
It won’t surprise anyone that unlike the general trend in Europe, most Maltese people worry more about their standard of living than the protection of European values. In people’s mind, too often, values have no value. The question was being asked as Europe was measuring the mood about the consequences of the war in Ukraine. [...]
God knows I’m not an expert. It’s not the smartest thing to rely on vaguely informed prejudices and making judgements on poorly informed smatterings of mostly misunderstood information. Don’t come here for an analysis of the ins and outs of Maltese (or any other sort of) football. But I know Joseph Muscat. I’ve been one [...]
Manuel Delia · A Question The Government Does Not Want Asking The debate at the Public Accounts Committee on whether police chief Angelo Gafà should be called to testify in the interminable Electrogas inquiry was spine-crushingly boring. The outcome was that the government MPs over-ruled the wishes of the opposition MPs to call Gafà to [...]
Neither the home ministry, nor the asset recovery bureau answered questions sent by this website on progress on a project announced in March of last year for a €2.5 million warehouse to house works of art, sports cars, and objects of value taken away from criminals who used dirty money to acquire them. The site [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times yesterday: "Before all this started, the general mantra was that it is statistically impossible that, within all the billions of dollars that flow through Malta, there is no dirty money worthy of prosecutions and convictions in court. "The billions still flow, perhaps slightly reduced. With all the additional rules [...]
Apparently quite a few people were in the room when Magistrate Yana Micallef Stafrace thundered at Janice Chetcuti and called her behaviour as doing ‘worse than the worst criminal whore has ever done in my courtroom’, or words to that effect. The magistrate reported the lawyer for – the Maltese text says – “joqgħodu jitbewwsu [...]