BREAKING/The Justice Minister and Zaren Vassallo: it’s a personal vendetta

The Justice Minister has spent the past few days behaving in a very un-Justice-Minister-like fashion, calling press conferences to denounce Zaren Vassallo, a big name in business in Malta (that’s for my non-Maltese readers).

What sort of Justice Minister behaves like that? First, he accused Vassallo of conspiring with the Nationalist government to acquire land in Marsa for a “cheap price” – you know, for all the world as though he were Mark Gaffarena obtaining a large tract of state-owned land in Tal-Handaq and several other pieces of public property in return for a small slice of one house in a cramped street in Valletta.

Then Vassallo issued a statement politely calling him a liar.

Not content with that, yesterday the Justice Minister put on his spectacles – to be taken seriously? – and called another press conference to ask out loud whether the Nationalist Party had paid back the quarter of a million euros which Vassallo had lent it. (The Nationalist Party issued a statement: yes, it has paid back the loan in full.)

You probably wondered why on earth the Justice Minister was getting involved in all that – it’s not his place as Justice Minister, they’re not subjects related to his portfolio anyway, and besides, it’s completely unseemly. That’s the sort of thing the Labour Party should do, not the government, and certainly not the Minister for Justice.

But today I can reveal that it’s a personal vendetta. The Justice Minister’s girlfriend, the Labour Party television reporter Janice Bartolo, has a young son by a man to whom she wasn’t married. Since they split up and she began seeing Minister Owen Bonnici, she has made this man’s life hell, trying to keep their son away from him, and even using her influence as the Minister’s Girlfriend to have the police ring him to stay away from his own son.

Janice Bartolo would even have the Minister’s official car and chauffeur drop off her son and pick him up from visits to his father – an abuse of public funds – to drive home the point that now she had clout.

And what is the name of the father of Janice Bartolo’s son, the man she resents so much and wants out of their son’s life, so that Noddy can be the surrogate father instead? (Dream on, Janice – the man isn’t even a fit father for his own daughter.)

It’s Joseph VASSALLO, whose late father was Zaren Vassallo’s brother.

Whatever the merit of anything Owen Bonnici had to say about Zaren Vassallo, he shouldn’t have been the one to say it, given the nature of his girlfriend’s problems with that family, and the fact that Zaren Vassallo is a great-uncle to Janice Bartolo’s son. But that, of course, is the reason why he did say all that. It was an exercise in Janice-driven spite and malice.