The police, the judiciary, the government – nowhere is safe

Published: July 3, 2015 at 10:05pm
Under Malta's shamelessly scandalous system, this 30-something from the boondocks, who can't keep it in his pants, can spend the next three years making his friends, cronies, former party officials and women he has or hasn't bedded judges and magistrates and they're there for life because only a two-thirds impeachment vote in parliament can remove them.

Under Malta’s shamelessly scandalous system, this 30-something from the boondocks, who can’t keep it in his pants, can spend the next three years making his friends, cronies, former party officials and women he has or hasn’t bedded judges and magistrates and they’re there for life because only a two-thirds impeachment vote in parliament can remove them.

At a social gathering this evening, the Justice Minister explained why he hasn’t made Magistrate Consuelo Herrera a judge. The subject came up because Magistrate Herrera was in another part of the room, but not speaking to him.

“Kif nista naghmilha mhallef,” Owen Bonnici said, “meta ghanda tlett kawzi quddiem il-Kummissjoni Ghall-Amministrazzjoni Tal-Gustizzja?”

True, but he showed no such qualms when he made his former ‘very close friend’ and failed Labour Party candidate Joanne Vella Cuschieri a magistrate. And he didn’t have similar scruples, either, about making the editor of the Labour Party’s official newspaper, Wenzu Mintoff, a judge when he is notorious for his political hdura and has never so much as argued a case in court.

Besides which, Owen Bonnici’s smart remarks show up our judge-and-magistrate-making system for what it really is: scandalous insanity. A 30-something from the boondocks get to appoint judges and magistrates FOR LIFE – judges and magistrates who cannot be removed except by a two-thirds majority impeachment vote in parliament – according to his leisure and pleasure.

And nobody can do anything about it or stop him. If Janice Bartolo were a lawyer, she would be a judge today. After all, he made Joanne Vella Cuschieri a magistrate.

And then he has the nerve to take the moral high ground where Consuelo Herrera is concerned. Heaven knows I think she’s absolute rubbish, but honestly, who is Owen Bonnici to talk?

They’re disgusting, the whole lot of them.

But isn’t it convenient that he made Wenzu Mintoff a judge? The civil suits which the Libyan government has filed against the Bank of Valletta, in an attempt at gaining control of the tens of millions (perhaps more) of euros which the Gaddafis stole from the Libyan state and deposited in Malta, have been allocated to Judge Wenzu. What a fortunate coincidence.

I had a call a couple of weeks ago from a French journalist I know, who is based in Paris and whose ‘beat’ is North Africa. She’s following the case and wanted to know whether I was in court that day (I wasn’t; I was away).

“I have read that the judge hearing this case was an official of the Labour Party for many years,” she said in shocked tones. “And people accept this in Malta? When the money was handled for the Gaddafis by Joe Sammut and he was an official of the Labour Party too?”

I’m really tired of making excuses, so I no longer bother. “Yes,” I said, “they accept it. That’s why those who appoint judges and those who allocate cases to judges or fail to remove judges from cases get away with it. Because people accept it.”