Perhaps you didn't think it possible, but Saviour Balzan has just hit a new low

The man in the picture is Jo Said, a friend of Malta Today’s 50% owner, Roger de Giorgio, and the unnamed ‘mental health’ issues individual who Balzan mentions below.

This afternoon, Saviour Balzan circulated the following press statement:

Stqarrija stampa

Saviour Balzan
Editur Maniġerjali

I apologise to my non-Maltese readers, but I don’t feel like translating it. I have too many pressing deadlines. Unlike Malta Today, which is running the story already (of course), I took time out from those deadlines to ring Edgar Galea Curmi for his side of the story – because if there are two people I don’t trust, outside of the actual Labour machine, it’s Saviour Balzan and Matthew Vella.

Balzan makes it sound as though Edgar Galea Curmi went knocking on his door, uninvited and unsolicited, to feed him information about Harry Vassallo.

This is the transcript of Galea Curmi’s answer to my questions about Saviour Balzan’s statement, right now. I’m allowed to talk to him, I feel I must add in these crazy times, because I’m a journalist.

This is completely unbelievable. I visited him at his home at his own request, to talk about political issues and the imminent general election, because his wife was seriously ill and he couldn’t leave her side to meet me at my office. We talked about several things. Afterwards, he sent me a card, thanking me and telling me that I have too soft a heart for politics. I will try to find that card and send it to you.

Me: “You shouldn’t send it to me. You should scan it and make it public.”

EGC: “No, no, I wouldn’t do that.”

It is true that Saviour Balzan’s wife (not the current one, obviously) was seriously ill at the time. In fact, she died shortly before that general election. When Edgar Galea Curmi visited Balzan at his request, she was in extremis. That’s why he went. That’s why Balzan asked him to go.

And now this.

The story on maltatoday.com.mt includes the following paragraph:

Balzan also said that Galea Curmi also tried to pass on sensitive information about a particular person’s mental health. He added that he would be willing to to mention the details of this case in court. “I am willing to confirm this in a court of law,” he said.

They make it sound as though Galea Curmi despicably popped round out of the blue to tell them that a person was mad. Anyone who knows Galea Curmi knows too that he is incapable of any such thing. He is very much the decent sort, which is why people like Saviour Balzan take advantage of him and persuade him with their sob-stories into going round to theirs because they can’t go round to his (“My wife is dying….etc etc” – even though he already had somebody else lined up and was seen kissing her in public two weeks after the funeral – and no, not the one he’s married to now, either.).

It’s quite obvious who the person with the mental health issues was: Jo Said, and they discussed him because everybody was discussing him then. He was all over the news, remember, making scenes on the steps of the Auberge de Castille and so on.

He definitely did have mental health issues because that was when he was ringing me at all hours of the night to rant on about the evils of the Nationalists. He was so unbalanced that when, one night at around midnight, I passed the phone to my husband and asked him to please deal with him, Said actually began arguing with him about his ‘right’ to talk to me at midnight, unsolicited and unwanted, and even said that it was none of my husband’s business and would my husband get off the line immediately and pass the phone back to me. It was incredible.

Something else: the reason Malta Today does not mention Jo Said by name in its ‘mental health’ bit is because he’s a good friend of Roger and Josianne de Giorgio, who own 50% of the newspaper (Balzan owns the other 50%). In fact, that’s how I met him – when he was with Mrs de Giorgio at a party and she introduced me.