The Valletta local council has unanimously elected Alexiei Dingli mayor, replacing Paul Borg Olivier, who tendered his resignation due to his appointment as PN secretary general on 30 June.

Dr Dingli accepted the post during a council meeting on Wednesday evening. He tendered his resignation as deputy mayor and PN councillor Joseph Spiteri was elected deputy mayor instead.

Although Dr Borg Olivier resigned as mayor, he is still a councillor and is expected to occupy the post until he gives a proper handover to Dr Dingli.

Dr Dingli, 29 – a lecturer at the University’s Faculty of ICT’s Department of Artificial Intelligence – was the PN councillor who obtained the second largest number of votes in this year’s local council election in Valletta.

Dr Dingli has been working in the Nationalist Party for these past 16 years. He started volunteering in the party when he was just 11, and at the age of 15, he was elected to the PN sectional committee in Valletta.

He successfully contested the Valletta local council elections for the first time in 2005. In these past years, he coordinated a large number of projects, the biggest being the setting up and coordination of the Valletta Community Network.

The project served as a catalyst to speed up the creation, by central government, of the first community centre in Valletta.