The Labour party is plummeting to new depths.  It has embarked on a campaign to discredit Jacob Borg, the Times journalist who was instrumental in uncovering some of Joseph Muscat's worst scandals. Labour is plastering photos of the journalist on their ONE news items and making every effort to tarnish his reputation.

An attack on Jacob Borg is an attack on all journalists, no matter which media house they work with. An attack on independent journalists is an attack on all of us - on our right to know what our political leaders are up to.

As recently as September 2024 Jacob Borg exposed secret plans for Accutor AG, the company that paid Joseph Muscat tens of thousands of euro, to receive 30% of Steward Health Care's dividends from Labour's  "fraudulent" hospitals deal.  The man who signed off on that secret profit-sharing deal was Armin Ernst, the man who Joseph Muscat accompanied to Castille within days of being ousted as Prime Minister, to lobby Robert Abela to give Steward an even sweeter deal - out of our money.

Ernst was meant to be charged over the Vitals-Steward scam.  He didn't show up.  He first claimed his wife was too ill for him to travel to Malta to face charges.  Now he's been detained by US federal law enforcement agents and his mobile phone seized. Meanwhile Joseph Muscat is frantically throwing spokes in the wheels of justice to delay and derail his prosecution. And Labour willingly lends him a hand in his efforts.

ONE news pounced on an editorial published by Saviour Balzan's Illum attacking the OCCRP, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.  OCCRP is the same organisation that selected Joseph Muscat, as their man of the year for corruption in 2019.  It's also been key to exposing some of the dirtiest deals relating to the fraudulent hospitals concession.

Labour is desperate to tarnish OCCRP too.  ONE news lied blatantly about the OCCRP.  Their news report falsely claimed that OCCRP is completely dependent on funds from the US government. The truth is that US government agencies fund only about 46% of all OCCRP's total spend.  The EU and EU countries fund 20%.  Another 25% of OCCRP funding comes from individuals and private foundations. Since 2010 the OCCRP website homepage carried the phrase "OCCRP is made possible by:" followed by the logos of USAID and other major donors.  Since 2019 OCCRP lists USAID on its webpage as one of 23 major donors.  OCCRP never hid the fact that it receives funds from US government agencies, but also from EU countries and other private donors.

ONE falsely claimed that the US government "has the last word on who can be investigated" by OCCRP.   "The American government controls who is investigated and against whom those investigations are conducted," ONE claimed. They accused OCCRP of conducting investigations purely "to tarnish other countries with every means possible".

The OCCRP is the largest organised network of investigative media in the world. It has 200 journalists spread across all continents.  It contributed to the largest international projects of investigative journalism of recent years -  the Pandora papers, the Pegasus project, the Laundromat series which exposed the money laundering schemes of ruling elites in Russia and Azerbaijan, and the Panama papers which ruined Keith Schembri's, Konrad Mizzi's and Joseph Muscat's plans.

The OCCRP groups 70 media members and 50 media partners from amongst the most prestigious - the New York Times, the Washington post, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Suddeutsche Zeitun and Le Monde.  In Malta it's worked with the Times and Sunday Times and others.  It won more than 100 journalism awards and is reputed for its quality and courage of reporters.  Their investigations allowed countries to retrieve over 10 billion dollars in lost revenue.

The OCCRP has categorically declared that the "US government has no influence on the choice or contents of the articles".  "From the beginning we made sure that government grants had impenetrable guardrails that would protect the journalism produced by OCCRP".

But ONE is desperate to destroy the credibility of the OCCRP.  Labour is also desperate to obliterate the trust in the Times and the Sunday Times. It's turned its guns onto Jacob Borg.

"Locally this project (OCCRP) is affiliated particularly with the Times of Malta and journalist Jacob Borg who was caught exchanging messages with exponents of the establishment such as Jason Azzopardi", ONE stated in its new item, earning it the condemnation of French Mediapart.            

Labour is in a panic. In 2022 the US International Narcotics and Law Enforcement agency (INL) made a 1 million dollar donation to OCCRP for a 2 year project intended "to strengthen the capacity of journalists in Malta and Cyprus to expose crime and corruption and accelerate the impact of investigative journalism".  In September 2024 they made another 1.3 million dollar donation for the same programme.

In Cyprus this led to a vast investigation in which OCCRP participated called "Cyprus confidential". It uncovered serious violations of international sanctions to aid Russia.  20 US FBI agents and agents from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network landed in Nicosia just 3 weeks after the report was published to help the Cypriots with the investigation.

Labour knows those funds will lead to more damning revelations even here in Malta. They know that more of the secret deals reached between Joseph Muscat, his co-defendants and his American collaborators, Armin Ernst and Ralph de La Torre, will emerge.  Those funds will help uncover the crucial evidence that our police force consistently fails to track down.

Everything the OCCRP, together with its Maltese media partners, revealed has never been questioned.  The OCCRP only exposed facts, corroborated with solid evidence. Labour cannot challenge the veracity of the facts revealed by the OCCRP, the Times, the Sunday Times and Jacob Borg.  So instead it resorts to intimidation of the journalist. By harassing him and vilifying him Labour aims to silence him. By attacking the OCCRP it attempts to discredit the organisation. 

As one South American media outlet which collaborates with OCCRP put it, "critics of OCCRP who parrot Putin's charge that the news organisation takes orders from the US are simply wrong".  When will Labour finally realise that attempting to protect Joseph Muscat using such cynical and devious tactics will only bring the party's downfall closer?