Rather than sending out a general call for a press conference, the Marigold Foundation last Wednesday chose to invite only journalists who sent queries about the Love Faith Forgiveness project, just a few hours after an article noted that prison inmates were being exploited.

The Marigold Foundation is chaired by Michelle Muscat, the Prime Minister’s wife. Normally all the media is invited for such conferenced, rather than only a selected few.

This newsroom asked why it hadn’t received the press invite, and in response, a spokeswoman for the Marigold Foundation said – “We received a number of queries from journalists, and instead of answering them by email we asked them to attend a briefing”.

Earlier that day, the Times of Malta had reported that female inmates at the Corradino prison are owed thousands of euros for curtain and costume design work they carried out over the past year in a project endorsed by the Prime Minister's wife, who chairs the Marigold Foundation.

The foundation however, does not seem to have any problem with emailing all newsrooms press statements, as they did a few days later on 2 April, when it admitted that the ‘Love, Faith, Forgiveness’ project, which runs the scheme which has left prisoners owed thousands of euros for work carried out, is not a registered NGO as required by law.

The Marigold Foundation said that since the start of the project, inmates were paid over €14,700 with the last payment effected on 23 February 2016. Detailed documentation of all work carried out by each inmate is kept. Other payments due in respect of work that has been carried out or is still ongoing will be paid as per normal procedures, the foundation said. The inmates were owed a total of €16,000. The Times of Malta today reports that they have now been paid in full.

The foundation denied that the inmates were being paid under normal market prices. The common practice, the foundation said, is to measure curtains by the width sewn rather than by length of the material. “This is logical since the length of material is generally standard and it would result in mis-measuring a job if length is applied instead of the width of the curtain produced.”

The Marigold Foundation had also, in that statement, expressed its disappointment at what the foundation said were “erroneous reports aimed to misinform the public with wrong facts on the Love Faith Forgiveness project, which helps inmates acquire a skill, work and prepare themselves for their return to society while serving their prison sentence at the Corradino Correctional Facilities.”