When I heard that the Foreign Minister has been taken ill with heart problems after his long-haul flight to China this week, which was followed immediately by meetings, I was not surprised. That's a truly punishing trip to make from Malta - a flight to Frankfurt, a battle through Europe's biggest airport, then a long flight to Beijing - even when you are 30 years younger than the Foreign Minister and don't have to head straight into meetings but can slowly recover from your jetlag. Being confined in a plane under cabin pressure for the best part of a long day in itself takes its toll on the constitution of the old, with risks to heart, lungs and the vascular system. The Foreign Minister is 73 and yet he has been given the cabinet post which requires the most travel and most international meetings.

I am all for people carrying on making themselves useful to society, but we have to be realistic. It is not even good for the Foreign Minister, because his health is clearly suffering. Unless you are a notoriously lazy person like the deputy Prime Minister, who has somehow engineered things to be completely invisible and silent to the point that people have forgotten that he exists and that we have a deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Europe, accepting a cabinet post or the chairmanship of a state organisation when you are in your 70s (Louis Grech is actually a little younger at 68) is not a good idea.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news, other than how awful it must be for the poor man and his family that he finds himself unwell when so far from home, and in hospital in Beijing of all places (that must be quite upsetting), was that Manuel Mallia must be girding his loins for his big comeback. If George Vella decides in favour of his health rather than his cabinet position, he shall have to be replaced, and the rumours began almost as soon as he was thrown out as Police, Army and Citizenship Minister that he was gunning for the post of Foreign Minister. At some point, when the rumours became too persistent the government was constrained to make it clear - I cannot remember whether it was by a direct statement or through sources - that it had no intention of reappointing Mallia to the post of Foreign Minister.

But I would say that Mallia thinks otherwise and that he has made his intentions clear.  I also think that the story published by MaltaToday yesterday, which had the fingerprints all over it of a deliberate government leak, was designed by the Office of the Prime Minister to make Mallia's demands untenable.

The story - and it is a good one, though they should have put Mallia in the headline and the first line as a good editor would know that that was the real news-peg - described how corrupt Police Inspector Daniel Zammit had been disciplined by Police Commissioner John Rizzo (they didn't mention his name, either, apparently because it didn't suit the government's purposes to praise the Commissioner they removed), stripped of his duties at the Criminal Investigation Department and deployed to the Valletta Police Station on ordinary beat duties.

This was because his superiors had discovered that he had gone into business with Paceville boss Hugo Chetcuti through Chetcuti's son Luke, who was then just 19 yet fronting his father's shares, and also because his links to Paceville operators and gaming companies had become more obvious. Zammit had also been warned not to go anywhere near the lap-dancing clubs and strip-clubs where he was often seen.

But after Manuel Mallia was made Police Minister in March 2013 and began by removing John Rizzo to protect John Dalli - and also, we now realise, to consolidate his grip on the police force, for potentially dubious reasons, through the appointment of his corrupt cousins Roderick and Daniel Zammit and their father Ray to positions that were key for his clients - Daniel Zammit was brought back from the Valletta Police Station and redeployed to the Economic Crimes Unit.

The sources who spoke to MaltaToday - and the newspaper would have said if they were police sources, but it just said 'sources' so I have to assume they were government - made it clear and emphasised the fact that this was done on Manuel Mallia's specific instructions, that it was Mallia who "put pressure" for Zammit to be deployed at the Economic Crimes Unit. You can see where this is going. The information links Mallia indelibly with the corruption of the Zammits and makes it obvious that he was cooperating with them, perhaps even using them, for reasons that are highly questionable.

In other words, whoever leaked that information to the newspaper had one aim in mind: to sabotage Manuel Mallia's attempt to replace George Vella as Foreign Minister.

 

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