Labour MEP Alfred Sant has replied to the Strickland Foundation, which took him to task over a commentary which was published on The Malta Independent on 1 April.
This is Alfred Sant’s reply:
In replying to my blog (01 April 2021) for THE MALTA INDEPENDENT on the Strickland Foundation issue, I am really and truly disquieted by the nonchalance with which the Foundation seeks to airbrush what it is, institutionally at least, responsible for. This is no time for « honi soit qui mal y pense » attitudinising.
It has transpired in court that serious allegations exist about fraud related to Allied Newspapers Limited and Progress Press Company. Public funds were also involved. The Strickland Foundation directors knew about this because they claimed to have investigated the whole episode related to the purchase of printing presses and arrived at private arrangements, never published, with their discredited former colleagues and appointees. Yet they apparently also failed to alert the police.
Were they skirting the law in doing so? Even if legal, was this moral on the part of a fourth estate organ?
For the publishing and news arm of the Strickland Foundation was repeatedly during the same time sounding the tocsin about other similar events, allegedly happening elsewhere. No matter how independently motored this publishing and news arm was or is, it failed to report on the fracas at Progress Press/Allied Newspapers Limited/Strickland Foundation.
Repeatedly, I drew their attention to this when “The Times” journalists would request my reactions to allegations about nefarious games being played elsewhere and was told off.
Playing with mirrors and shadows as The Strickland Foundation directors seem to be now doing, will hardly clear what their role has been in past years over this very sad affair. Perhaps they should follow the advice being given to others by their own journalists and retire from their positions?
In the circumstances and seeing how they are handling the fallout of the ongoing court cases, I am increasingly coming to suspect that far from making “baseless and unjustified claims”, as they allege, Mabel Strickland’s nephew Mr Robert Hornyold Strickland has indeed been trumped long term by the manipulations of a friends of friends deep system within the Foundation itself.