Rai broadcast a 1 hour feature a couple of days ago on the internationalisation of Italian organised crime and its infiltration in the financial system. There's a Malta segment (in English) that starts at 54' where I speak about the work and the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. View the film here. You'll need to [...]

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee could be a useful tool in fighting corruption and administrative wrong-doing. If reality wasn’t such a poor reflection of what Lawrence Gonzi must have imagined the PAC could be when he helped design it in the 1990s. Watching sessions of the PAC is ever so slightly less agonising than watching plenary [...]

I enter the fray on matters Eurovision with less enthusiasm than if I was slouching on my dentist’s couch. It’s not whether I liked the song or I didn’t. Ugh. It’s not whether the voting is fair or it isn’t. Shudder. It’s not whether the dress was too short or the short was too dress. [...]

This is your MEP Alex Agius Saliba who, to be kind, I imagine walked into the wrong committee at the European Parliament building and read from the wrong script. The man cannot trust himself to speak English without reading it because he's plain hilarious when he's stuck in a situation where he's forced to try. [...]

announces the launch of 9 June 2021 At Margo’s Palazzo Santa Rosa Mistra Bay 19:00 Includes Panel Discussion with Christian Peregin, Ġorġ Mallia, Louiselle Vassallo, and George Vital Zammit This is a seated and socially-distanced event in conformity with the Superintendence of Public Health guidelines. Seats will be allocated on pre-registration only. Please click on this [...]

The family of Miriam Pace have settled their claim against the developers who destroyed their property killing their wife and mother when their house collapsed over her head. The amount of the settlement is, understandably, undisclosed. The compensation, whatever the amount, is nothing like justice. We can only hope our institutions give Miriam Pace the [...]

I fully realise I’m expected to apologise these days before criticising the administration on matters it considers as its key successes. I was eviscerated mercilessly in the days after they opened for something like the fifth time the spaghetti junction in Marsa. I can only begin to imagine what they would do if they decide [...]

Manuel Delia · The Tragedy Of The Commons My podcast yesterday criticised the CEO of the Planning Authority for appearing to suggest that he is powerless in the face of land owners’ determination to do with their property as they please. I called this sort of attitude Whiggish, after the liberals of Victorian England. The [...]

The prognosis for journalists reporting things that displease tyrants like Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko is never better than dim. But the outrage of what has happened in our Europe in the last day or two is a new extreme. Roman Protasevich was flying from one EU city to another on a Ryanair flight. The plane he [...]

Manuel Delia · Planners For Modernity The chief planner’s interview with the Times of Malta yesterday makes for depressing reading. Martin Saliba dismisses as ‘sentimental’ and ‘nostalgic’ the effort of isolated and ignored campaigners to push back against the wilful destruction of our urban and rural landscape. His arguments are replete with contradictions. He has [...]

An amnesia is a form of memory loss. Some people with amnesia have difficulty forming new memories. Others cannot recall facts or past experiences. People with amnesia usually retain the knowledge of their own identity, as well as motor skills. Mild memory loss is a normal part of ageing. Amnesia refers to the loss of [...]

When a large majority of a community becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely, we use the expression “herd immunity”. The meaning I would like to give to this expression in this post is quite different. I feel that in our society, we have reached this level of herd [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Recently, I put a few euros in some ads on Facebook carrying a picture of the cover of my new book that is coming out shortly. I put in the money hoping awareness of the book could break out of the bubble of like-minded people that Facebook [...]

Here I sit a day before the big event. The event that fully symbolises us:  the trashy, idiotic Eurovision Song Festival. This festival is so dumb that our singer’s destiny depends on various factors which are absolutely unconnected to talent. I do not possess a crystal ball. And I have no clue what position our [...]

During the Easter weekend of last year, the Maltese army ignored pleas to rescue a boat stranded in Malta’s search and rescue area. After enough time for twelve people to die of thirst while waiting passed, a fishing boat that hid its name and flag picked the remaining survivors up and took them to Libya. [...]

Read this Facebook post by Clyde Caruana, a slightly more explicit version of his Ministry's earlier statement about the Ċaqnu tax discount story. Clyde Caruana's statement shows that he appreciates he'll find it difficult to convince anyone to pay tax on time if he's giving sweet deals to spectacular tax dodgers. If that's true, "categorical" [...]

The full details are here. Times of Malta this morning reported, Charles Polidano got a huge chunk of the €40 million tax bill he's been accumulating since the 1990s shaved off. They reported he made a down-payment and entered into an agreement to pay the rest over time. But some of it was also taken [...]

UPDATED: 15:07. The Government has denied in a statement this afternoon Times of Malta's report of this morning saying iċ-Ċaqnu's €40 million tax bill has been slashed to €10 million. Read the denial here. Read the facts in the Times of Malta’s report. Iċ-Ċaqnu owed the taxman €40 million accumulated over 25 years. The news [...]

Corruption in the form of bribery and misuse of public funds is a major obstacle to democracy and economic development in many of the world’s poor countries. - Ulla Tørnæs, Denmark’s Minister for Development Cooperation. If you take a look at social media, you would think that on this sun-kissed rock, the Almighty has sent [...]