When then Magistrate Aaron Bugeja wrapped up the Egrant inquiry he went beyond his call of duty. The exercise of collecting evidence was meticulous, laborious and expensive. Aaron Bugeja was definitely within his rights to conclude that he found insufficient evidence to let him confirm with any confidence that the claim that Egrant belonged to [...]
Rightly, there was a lot of talk yesterday about Simon Busuttil being proved right. Of course, he was. I’m rather bothered right now about the people proven wrong. I’m thinking right now of Giovanni Grixti. The Criminal Court judge blocked another inquiry that Simon Busuttil requested and Magistrate Ian Farrugia accepted should be launched saying [...]
‘Business-friendly’ as Joseph Muscat meant it is ultimately a business-unfriendly form of government. As he flirted with private interests at those lunches before 2013 that Sandro Chetcuti and others organised for him, Joseph Muscat promised business leaders he would run his government as some sort of clearing house for them. This sounded appealing. Certainly, more [...]
An element of Keith Schembri’s spin on what’s happening to him is that the charges he faced yesterday are unrelated to his position in government. TVM newspaper commenters, including Michael Falzon the former PN minister who stashed his ill-gotten gains in Switzerland and was pardoned for it by Joseph Muscat, took up that spin this [...]
Picture: Malta Today Keith Schembri won’t take this lying down. He’s going to fight, and he’s going to blame everyone but himself, and he’s going to play the martyr, and he’s going to give us a lot of that macho working class hero crap, and he will give no quarter to the idea [...]
It is remarkable that Adrian Delia tried to take credit for yesterday’s outcome. Let’s just measure the opportunity cost, right? It’s a big if to wonder what things might be if Simon Busuttil did not resign the leadership in 2017 so let’s not even speculate that far. But we can, in our controlled intellectual experiment, [...]
I’m not quite sure what the financial services regulator is waiting for to strike off Zenith, Matthew Pace’s rebranded financial services firm that helped Keith Schembri hide his money. They provided services for grandees like Robert Musumeci and Deo Scerri too but Matthew Pace slept hard last night because of Keith Schembri’s business. Someone at [...]
The prison director had explained to me how induction into prison works under covid conditions. New prisoners are immediately set up in Division 6, a corner of prison so mediaeval that the Committee to Prevent Torture argues it should be shut down altogether. The miserable area is kept in business as a deterrent like the [...]
Think back to October 2018. Parliament. Chris Cardona is sweating. He’s just been caught in a lie. He had told the police and everyone else who cared to listen that France 2’s April 2018 report that he had met one of the Degiorgios before their arrest was false. He didn’t know the Degiorgios. But La [...]
People saw Karl Cini weeping in court today when he realised he's going to be sleeping, if at all, within fart-smelling distance of Yorgen Fenech. It's funny that he seems to be the only one not to have seen this coming. Tomorrow ask to speak to the police and tell them all you know. It's [...]
Look at this. Some politicians are trying to understand the direction in which the crowd is running so they can chase it, stand before it and lead it. I called out Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando later for realising only today that Keith Schembri was up to no good. He had the benefit of Daphne Caruana Galizia's [...]
Perhaps in response to Chris Cardona's creativity, here's another imaginary street name. After all the Kink Joseph the Great ran the government that's in the dock today.
On a WhatsApp group chat of Labour Party loyalists, Chris Cardona posted this image this morning. It's not just that it's Simon Busuttil birthday today. It's that some time this afternoon, it would seem, Simon Busuttil's "empty" boxes of evidence filed in 2017, will be kick-starting the prosecution of a criminal gang that took possession [...]
On the 21st of March, on the first day of every spring, the Italian anti-mafia NGO Libera marks the day of memory of innocent victims of mafia organisations. The initiative started from the pain of a mother of one of the victims of the Capaci massacre. His name was not mentioned in the initial reporting. [...]
Here's Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando abandoning the Keith Schembri's ship as it sinks. Think of how many times he called us liars and traitors, how many times he asked us for "the proof", how many times he insulted us, how he attacked protesters calling for the institutions to catch up with Keith Schembri, how he denounced [...]
A series of people are showing up at the police’s economic crimes office for what is reportedly a last session of interrogations before they’re arraigned in court with charges of money laundering and related crimes. I do not have visibility of the charges but it appears by all accounts, including the account of the chief [...]
Look how the mighty have fallen. Keith Schembri’s Facebook rant today was a proper squirm-fest. Any day now he’s going to be dragged to a court room and charged with a small fraction of his many responsibilities. We have to start somewhere. Looks like we might. Even Keith Schembri must be right some of the [...]
Issa sew. Robert Abela yesterday said he wanted to clear the air after Vince Muscat told a court a sitting Minister helped him and his gang execute a criminal act. The working theory is that Vince Muscat was referring to the 2010 HSBC bank heist and that Carmelo Abela, then an MP, now a Minister, [...]
The general line I try to take is to ignore people like Christian Grima. It didn’t start that way. When he first came back from wherever he was, I thought his motivations were genuine. On that basis I reacted to things he said that did not make sense to me. Then I regretted my reaction. [...]
Right. A witness for the prosecution tells an open court that a sitting minister helped out his gang in a criminal action. I suggested yesterday he may have been referring to the 2010 HSBC heist and to Minister Carmelo Abela who at the time was an Opposition MP and a Manager at HSBC. Predictably, microphones [...]