I am writing to provide a fuller picture of the facts that have led me to leave Malta for a while. I have to do so because I have left room for misinterpretation and controversy that distracts from the real and burning issues facing this country. In an interview with an Italian press freedom NGO [...]
The AUM has gone quiet in recent months and the government’s been keeping mum on this one, too. Must be because the massive cohort of students are still enjoying their annual summer leave. At least, that’s how Professor John Ryder explained the void to me when I interviewed him in his office two years ago. [...]
The defence for Alfred and George Degiorgio had all but one of their over 100 technical objections to the prosecution’s case against them definitively struck down yesterday by the Court of Criminal Appeal. That’s a creditable score for the prosecution which can now get ready to make its case to a jury and prove the [...]
You will have heard that in the next few days I’m stepping away from the island because of security concerns. I am, as you might imagine, impatient for those concerns to be addressed. My family is here, my home is here, my work is here. So here is where I want to be if I [...]
An anonymous correspondent writing on Simon Mercieca’s blog asks a pertinent question. Why is the Attorney General’s office “losing one trial after the next”? Put properly the question might give a clearer picture of its importance. Why is Malta failing to convict so many people it brings to trial? The question is pertinent because its [...]
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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana Those who, like me, are of a certain age will surely remember what Malta went through in the seventies and eighties under the regime run by the party then known as the Malta Labour Party. The Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud [...]
The crisis in the prison has now been “politicised”. I use that word with the meaning it has acquired in the local context which is not what the word properly means. An event in Malta is said to be “politicised” the moment it becomes impossible to persuade anyone to change an opinion they feel is [...]
Joseph Portelli’s interview with Times of Malta’s Mark Laurence Zammit raises a number of questions. Let’s be clear from the outset. I’m going to take quotes out of their proper context and jumble them together in ways Joseph Portelli did not mean them to be. So the charge of unfairness and perhaps even the risk [...]
That must be awkward. The judgement he’s most known for is the one when he accepted an appeal by the Panama Gang against an order of a lower court to start an in genere inquiry on the back of Simon Busuttil’s argument that the Panama Papers gave enough indications of the existence of a crime [...]
This set is by Jon Borg
Josette Schembri Vella, known by readers of this website as Mrs Prince of Darkness, was today, at long last, charged with money laundering. A company she part-owns was also charged. Through the noice in the courtroom while bail was debated there was talk of a small number of euro with several zeroes at the end [...]
Perhaps like me you’ve sometimes wondered how they manage to do it. Consider Robert Abela yesterday spraying his shorts with that stupid political o face as he received an envelope from EU taxpayers with a cheque for several hundred million euro to help us with the covid recovery. I know it’s not exactly a new [...]
They say it's 2021, but we're back to 1984. A water polo player has been suspended for 10 games and fined €960 after the association’s disciplinary commissioner found him guilty of threatening to kill an official of the aquatic sports association that organises the water polo league. You’d think it’s an ordinary story for the [...]
This set is by Darrin Zammit Lupi
Read the interview the grieving father of the last suicide in Kordin prison gave Matthew Xuereb. Two warders are being charged with involuntary homicide in the case. The parent’s version of the story is different from the official story in a number of respects. Officially the prison authorities say they had no reason to suspect [...]
A report in an Italian newspaper says that local entrepreneur Paul Hili discussed with an intermediary speaking for Milan-based Banca Generali transferring Yorgen Fenech’s 17 Black money from Dubai. The report in today’s La Stampa says that an Italian entrepreneur with interests in Monaco, the UAE, Albania, and Turkey, Mirko Albertazzi, informed Paul Hili that [...]
There are small questions like which is the next restaurant I must try. There are greater questions like will my salary last till the end of the month. Will I have a job next month? Who will win the next election? Will Daphne’s killers get what they deserve? Where is the next terrorist attack going [...]
