The Minister of Social Dialogue was faced media questions yesterday about whether her aide Cyrus Engerer has access to sensitive information in her private secretariat or ministry. She replied in the negative, but while it was reassuring it was still fundamentally wrong. A cabinet minister should be able to say or his or her aides, in response to a question like that, that all aides are carefully scrutinised, given background checks, and selected for their trustworthiness and honesty. So it is irrelevant whether they have access to sensitive or confidential information or not.

Instead, what Minister Dalli said there was, effectively, “Don’t worry, Cyrus Engerer might be what he is, but he doesn’t have access to sensitive information. You can put your mind at rest about that.”

The thing is, it doesn’t even put our minds at rest that Engerer has no access to information about people through his work at the ministry. He has proved himself to be a person with few scruples about matters of loyalty and honesty, and not merely within the strict confines of the facts laid out in the Court of Appeal’s judgement. So what is to stop him getting, or trying to get, information to which he has no access, perhaps through some third party who does have that access? Somebody like that should never be in a minister’s trust, working as an aide or consultant. By keeping him on, Minister Dalli is simply making herself vulnerable. And she has made herself more vulnerable still with the latest recruit to her private secretariat, her public relations and logistics consultant Marisa Schembri. I have never known Ms Schembri to be a discreet person, but rather the opposite. Her conversation is ear-bending. It’s amusing for those who are listening, but hardly amusing for those who are talked about. I can’t help but think of those vintage British war-time posters that chastised people with the message ‘Loose talk sinks ships.’

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The reports from the Courts of Justice, in the trial of the man who stands accused of being one of several who bound and beat surgeon and, at the time, Labour MP Anthony Zammit, is quite upsetting.  Malta is such a small place with the population of a normal town in Britain or France, and yet there are so very many truly awful people about, violent and sordid, or both. Because the island is the size it is, you are left with the feeling that people like that are all around you, going undetected, and that you never quite know what is going on beneath the surface of things.

Any sort of violation in one’s own home is a terrible thing, and older people who live alone, like Zammit, appear to be particularly vulnerable because intruders or violators, whether invited or uninvited, feel able to behave with impunity safe in the knowledge that they will not hear a key in the lock as another resident of the house returns. Yet I have to say, too, that the details emerging in the trial are not at all reassuring about the behaviour of somebody who was a member of parliament at the time and a senior surgeon at the state general hospital, and who comes from a respectable background.

I mention that last because there is nothing at all he could possibly have in common with somebody like the mayor of Zurrieq. Whatever the nature of their personal relationship, I hardly think that an important surgeon at the state general hospital should be seeing patients at Natius Ola salon in Zurrieq, which is mainly associated with hair removal, make-up and similar. True, the mayor of Zurrieq has sought to rebrand his establishment as ‘health and beauty’ but in my experience, surgeons who spend the day operating on people for cancer and other life-saving procedures do not then go to consultancy clinics in places like Natius Ola, though they might see outpatients at proper clinics or private hospitals. 

Zammit said that he was out for dinner that night with Natius Farrugia, owner of the eponymous salon, and with a patient he had been seeing. This, too, is astonishing, as surgeons do not generally socialise with their patients and with the owners of the clinics/salons where those patients are seen. There is more to this than meets the eye, and the sensation I get that Zammit is reluctant to say the full facts – mainly, I suspect, because he is embarrassed and feels awkward and foolish and for no other reason – is borne out by the repeated requests of the prosecution to hear him behind closed doors.