Prime Minister Robert Abela chose to lie about me on ONE radio. He claimed the PN used me to report him to the Standards Commissioner.  He accused me of hypocrisy. He told his party faithful that I mounted “an attack” against his Cabinet. Abela is so desperate he’s now resorting to complete fiction to divert attention from the Vitals/Steward disaster.

On 2 July 2024, Abela got the Department of information to publish a reprehensible statement on his behalf and on behalf of the entire cabinet. The Times and OCCRP had just revealed that Steward had diverted millions of taxpayers’ euro, meant for sick patients to dig up dirt on Chris Fearne, Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister.  When they found none, they made up false claims to tarnish his reputation.  The whole country was aghast.

Labour was in panic mode.  The public’s eyes were opened to the fact that everything the independent media, the OCCRP, the Daphne Foundation, the Medical Association of Malta and the Opposition had revealed about the fraudulent Vitals/Steward deals was true.  Labour’s persistent defence of both Vitals and later Steward now looked as pathetically dishonest as it was.  The whole nation woke up to the fact that Steward wasn’t the real deal, as Fearne reassured us.  Steward was using tactics to destroy those who stood in the way of its continued looting of the state in collusion with government officials.

Abela was exposed as a fumbling incompetent.  Who could forget Abela defending Steward in parliament and lauding it for all the “work” it had carried out? Nobody could forget Abela’s efforts to strike a new deal with Steward. Everything Abela told us about was false.  Steward weren’t protecting our interests, they were using millions of our money to damage our own deputy prime minister.

The country realises Abela fooled us all.  Now he’s panicking. That’s why he abusively used the DOI to issue that statement: “The Cabinet notes how the Opposition was always ready to try and destroy the former Deputy Prime Minister…The Nationalist Opposition was never interested in Malta’s position but only in immediate political partisan capital”.

Every decent citizen recognises that Abela’s DOI statement is not just an abuse of power: it’s offensive and insolent. The Opposition has a constitutional role. It is democratically elected and represents a substantial proportion of the population. Such partisan official statements have no place in a democracy - and Abela knows it.

The Standards Commissioner twice warned that DOI statements should be “as factual, non-partisan and authoritative as possible”.  Abela’s DOI statement is none of those.  It is just vile vitriol directed at the Opposition.

Abela’s statement condemned the lies and fabrications paid for by our own money to destroy Fearne and their disgraceful dissemination.

Yet Abela chose to do the same thing himself.  When I lodged a complaint with the Standards Commissioner requesting him to investigate whether that press release was “factual, non-partisan and as authoritative as possible”, Abela resorted to lies and offence.

Instead of humbly apologising to the public for the fraudulent hospitals concession, he told Manuel Micallef on his ONE Programme Sibt il-Punt:  “I am going to give you some news today”.  That “news” was that I had lodged a complaint about his press release.  With all the mayhem and the huge backlash from the latest revelations about Steward’s abuse, Abela’s “news” to the nation was sheer pettiness. When the nation faces such a serious situation, a true leader doesn’t try and pick up fights with his own citizens, he doesn’t engage in small-minded squabbles.

Abela is no leader. He resorted to childish insults. He accused me of “hypocrisy”.  He made entirely baseless false accusations, declaring the PN used me to launch “attacks”.

“The hypocrisy of the PN and those affiliated with it…the obvious tactic of the PN is one - attacks like these, that is because of a Cabinet statement they go to the Standards Commissioner.  What they’re doing is throwing the stone and hiding their hand.  They use their affiliates who work in the periphery of the party but whoever it was couldn’t hide his hand because he is an ex-PN candidate, having contested the 2017 election, a person who doesn’t have the Labour party or its militants at heart,” Abela commented.

Abela is with his back to the wall. He didn’t pay millions to make up stories, he simply fabricated them and disseminated them himself on his party’s station. This is Labour’s perennial tactic of intimidation and demonisation.  They did the same to Daphne Caruana Galizia, falsely accusing her of being the mouthpiece of the PN. A public inquiry exposed the ruthlessness of Labour’s persistent persecution of the journalist, the vile offence, the threats and intimidation. 

Robert Abela is the man responsible for implementing the recommendations of the Caruana Galizia inquiry. Instead, here he is, targeting his critics with fabrications, using the very same tactics the inquiry condemned. At least Joseph Muscat got Glenn Bedingfield, his party station and his trolls to harass her.  Robert Abela does it himself.

Lodging a complaint with the Standards Commissioner is not an attack on anybody.  It’s a civil right enjoyed by every citizen.

The PN didn’t use me to lodge that complaint.  I lodged it myself, shocked at our Prime Minister’s increasingly autocratic behaviour and brazen abuse of the civil service. I lodged it because I expect our Prime Minister and his cabinet to have the basic decency to respect their very basic code of ethics.

Abela’s petty reaction to that complaint only reinforces the increasingly dominant view - Abela is not fit for office.