Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/888285
maltatoday WEDNESDAY 18 OCTOBER 2017 News 7 other moments. A person snapped with a Labour Party official or candidate, maybe having said something stupid on Facebook, or the proverbial chav (at one point, she almost serialized Facebook photos of one particular Qormi family whose guilt was to have been Labour flag-waving voters), would earn rebuke on her blog. It was entertainment, not jour- nalism. But that's what people resent- ed, the way she could irrespon- sibly shift from high-minded opinion and investigative jour- nalism, to tabloid trash. People resented her for disregarding journalistic ethics, sometimes causing unnecessary pain to those not in the public eye for no public interest. Caru- ana Galizia's targets included countless private citizens, journalists and family mem- bers of political actors, equally harassed and mocked on mat- ters not entirely related to any public interest except for their association with Labour. Her critics denigrated such excesses, defamation suits were filed. In one incident, a Labour mayor who stumbled into her at a Rabat festa, was charged with harassing her. Thick skin was needed when dealing with a Daphne Caruana Galizia blogpost. And Malta's reading public was not inured to this kind of liberty. I witnessed how Caruana Galizia's gratuitous non-sto- ries and malicious and unveri- fied allegations, brought great anxiety to colleagues, unable to bring themselves to face a day of work; it made private in- dividuals anxious by thrusting them into a public spotlight they neither asked nor yearned for, simply by guilt of associa- tion with an intended target; family relatives and children not associated with any act of public policy, were rubbished intentionally as the quickest way of getting at the intended target. But the "one-woman WikiLe- aks" – or if you were on the other side, the one-woman Breitbart – was about to take shape. LABOUR'S election took Daph- ne Caruana Galizia to new heights, even as this newspa- per lampooned her in an edi- torial cartoon as the figure of Edvard Munch's The Scream, to illustrate her shock at the scale of the electoral loss suf- fered by Lawrence Gonzi to Jo- seph Muscat. The new Nationalist Opposi- tion had been confounded by an unprecedented 36,000-vote loss, and now Labour had a nine-seat majority. Caruana Galizia was incessant in tak- ing Labour to task. This time, she carved herself a new niche, with her eagle-eyed approach to the news applied to keep- ing the Labour government in check. The PN, for some time having lost the position of in- fluence it had held in the tradi- tional media, could depend on Caruana Galizia as an unoffi- cial party organ. Caruana Galizia's campaign was unstinting. Labour, she insisted, was not fit to be in government. Soon, the slip-ups of the newbie administration seemed to fit her narrative al- though hers was a voice also compromised by partisanship. Early on, it was revealing that Labour intended to create a national money-spinner by selling off passports. At times, she would blog further on the scoops and newspaper reports on government maladminis- tration, giving a necessary sec- ond spin on the facts. Some reports became the sub- ject of government inquiries: when she revealed a family link between acting commissioner of police Ray Zammit and the Gaffarena family, she painted the picture of a botched mur- der investigation that was aug- mented by a business relation- ship. The inquiry revealed a shocking scale of intimacy be- tween police officers and busi- nessmen. That Ray Zammit, a discredited acting police chief who lost his job after the Shee- han shooting inquiry, was re- tained to helm the new govern- ment agency for local wardens, added insult to injury. And then came the Panama Papers. For an entire year, the ICIJ was busy working on one of the greatest journalist stories ever unearthed. Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose son was work- ing with the ICIJ at the time, was already drip-feeding the big story with an enigmatic photo of a lamb… a reference to the New Zealand trust that had been set up by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri to act as a conduit for their Pana- ma offshore companies. When Konrad Mizzi moved in to declare his trust in a bid to pre-empt what Caruana Galizia already knew too well, the Panama Papers broke in Malta a month ahead of sched- ule. Before the Panama Papers broke internationally, she had revealed that Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri had set up their offshore companies right after Labour's election; and that Schembri used off- shore companies in his pri- vate affairs. It was a story that almost brought Labour to its knees, with the ICIJ's partners in Malta ramping up the pres- sure and revealing the extent to which Mizzi and Schembri were searching for interna- tional bank accounts for their planned ventures. When she appeared in the European Parliament's PANA committee, I remember dis- tinctly the one piece of testi- mony that stuck in my mind. It was a simple observation. For had it not been for the Panama Papers, much of the admin- istration's affairs would have moved on unquestioned and untouched, with the public none the wiser about the gov- ernment's privatization of state hospitals and energy deals. A year later, Caruana Galizia claimed that a Labour minis- ter, the deputy prime minister, had been in a German brothel during official business. She had no hard evidence except for her insistence that some- body witnessed him inside the brothel. Chris Cardona sued for libel. Caruana Galizia's lawyers demanded his geolo- cation data. A case of the tail wagging the dog, but this epi- sode highlighted the influence Caruana Galizia had now ac- quired when she would publish a story. And then came Egrant. It was the third Panama company set up by Mossack Fonseca's agents in Malta, alongside Keith Schembri's and Konrad Mizzi's. Caruana Galizia was now claiming that a sacked Russian employee had seen a declaration of trust showing Egrant was owned by Joseph Muscat's wife; and that the daughter of Azerbaijani dicta- tor Ilham Aliyev had a million dollars wired from Dubai to a Pilatus bank account. Muscat requested a magiste- rial inquiry. The declaration of trust was never made pub- lic. The Nationalist leadership took the allegations to town, and with that the slew of leaks from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit of its site vis- its to Pilatus, with claims of kickbacks paid for the sale of passports by Nexia BT's Brian Tonna, to Keith Schembri, the PM's chief of staff; and an un- finished inquiry into a Dubai company called Black 17, os- tensibly set up by the operators of the LNG supplier in Malta, again with unproven links to Mizzi and Schembri. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a prime mover of the allega- tions. With the Opposition in full attack mode, Joseph Mus- cat moved to call a snap elec- tion, claiming that PN leader Simon Busuttil was sowing instability in the country. "He took his people out on a na- tional protest on the strength of a lie, and made an appeal to the forces of law and order to take some sort of action against me, or carry out an act of disobedience… there were moments where my wife and I were listening to a lie that was intended at destroying my ca- reer and bringing instability in the country," Muscat said. Labour was returned to power with a higher majority than in 2013. Muscat later said Caruana Galizia's actions were "a deliberate conflation of lies with a speck of truth." Carua- na Galizia's fans disagree, for they see in Muscat a liar; ask a Muscat follower, and they will say the feeling is mutual. The 'WikiLeaks' were tainted by a lot of personal repartees that stung in a small society where shame was easily brought about by someone with an ex- ceptional writing style. In the last months, when the new PN leader Adrian Delia announced his bid for the lead- ership, she got wind of his past activities as a lawyer operating an offshore client account for the Maltese owner of several Soho properties that were in- volved in a prostitution racket. Even with the party she rooted for at its lowest ebb, she was adamant that Delia does not become leader because he was not suited for the role. Delia replied with five libel suits. He did not file any against Malta- Today, which followed the sto- ry when it received informa- tion of its own and confirmed the allegations. What had happened to Caru- ana Galizia "to turn against her own"? It was a question that merited a proper reply. It wasn't simply Caruana Galizia writing with- out fear or favour. It was Carua- na Galizia channelling the soul of the party whose tradition, as she probably saw it, was the one instilled by Eddie Fenech Adami – the man who best il- lustrated the antidote to Mint- offian thuggery. In this sense, it was this principle which best captured how she saw that red line of the partisan divide. And Delia, to her, was not fit to lead Fenech Adami's party, having been so carefully bequeathed to his worthy successors. FOR years, the anthropology graduate would always turn to a classic trope in the field – amoral familism – to explain what she felt was wrong with the country. "It's the reason people in Mal- ta use their vote as currency and do not think in terms of the common good or choos- ing the right government, but in terms of spiting/rewarding, getting/preventing others from getting. It is also the reason why even monied and suppos- edly educated individuals are not embarrassed – rather, they are proud because they think it is a heroic act and that it is perfectly normal and civilised – to talk openly about not vot- ing for this or that party, or not voting at all, on the basis of personal matters and what they wish to obtain personally (or prevent others from obtain- ing)." For her, this reasoning was completely unacceptable in a civilised democracy, seeing it completely at odds with other more developed European so- cieties. She said it in 2013, and in 2017, those electoral turning points that sent the Nationalist Party into disarray. In her last blogpost, she signed off with a disconcerting quip on the Panama inquiry playing out in the Maltese courts. "Crooks everywhere." That execution, that heinous act of murder, employing all the aesthetic of Mafia-style assassination, tore everyone apart. It was an attack on de- mocracy, on the fourth estate, on the role journalists play in keeping people to account, an attack on a denigrated profes- sion. Caruana Galizia must have yet again been on the cusp of something big. SITUATION VACANT R. SCICLUNA LTD • Mason • Heavy plants drivers • Roofing for concrete Contact Rennie Scicluna on 79497274