The government has declared war on the Times of Malta

The Times of Malta has just been informed that the current affairs show it used to produce for TVM has been axed from the upcoming autumn/winter schedule.

Glenn Bedingfield, the Prime Minister’s aide, has also been leading the charge against that newspaper.

All this has been happening since the board of directors at Allied Newspapers Ltd, which owns the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times, forced Adrian Hillman to resign from the position of managing director. This was after this website revealed (more details were to emerge later in the Panama Papers) that Hillman has a secret company in the British Virgin Islands, set up in association with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and that at a certain point corrupt accountant Brian Tonna took steps on their behalf to build further walls of secrecy.

Now that the Prime Minister’s corrupt chief of staff no longer has the corrupt managing director of the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times in his pay and his pocket, he and the government have clearly decided that the best way to go about things now is to launch a campaign to bully – because it can no longer buy or blackmail – the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times into submission. It has worked with other journalists, newspapers and media owners, so they hope it will work with those newspapers too.

But I don’t think it will, somehow. Allied Newspapers Ltd is now in the perfect position to reach a deal with Adrian Hillman in exchange for every last detail of what he knows about Keith Schembri’s illicit activities and transactions laundered through the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Panama.

It will be a very difficult deal to reach, because Hillman will need to work out the risks to himself. But I hope that Allied Newspapers remembers throughout the process that, yes, it is a company with big damages to claim from Hillman, but that it is also a company which exists for no purpose other than to own and run two newspapers. And they are sitting directly on one of the biggest stories in Maltese newspaper history.