Nowhere left for Muscat to hide on matter of his scheming friendship with John Dalli

Giovanni Kessler, the European Commission’s top investigator, testified in the Court of Justice in Valletta today in the bribery and corruption trial of John Dalli’s close aide, Silvio Zammit.

Kessler said of the situation two years ago, following the election of the Labour Party to government, that his organization, OLAF, closely followed reports in the Maltese press, through which they understood that Dalli “reappeared in Malta, having solved the health issues which prevented him from travelling to Malta earlier (to face prosecution by Police Commissioner John Rizzo)”.

He then found out that the police commissioner who was planning to prosecute Dalli was removed and replaced by somebody else with no similar plans.

“A few days after he was appointed, the new chief of police went on a famous television talk show on a Saturday evening, and said that the case against John Dalli is over,” Kessler said on the witness stand. “On the Monday, there was a lot of noise about this in Brussels.”

Kessler told the court that a newspaper in Malta began proclaiming victory and passing on articles to news media and commentators in Brussels.

This website is offering no prizes for those who guess which newspaper that is.

Kessler then rang Police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit, to ask what this was all about. The Police Commissioner told him that the case against Dalli was on-going (when he had said the opposite on television and to the press, which is why Dalli then organised a ‘thanksgiving mass’ said by his priest-brother Gorg in Hal Qormi).

Tobacco lobbyists, Kessler told the court, “clearly understood that the bribe requests came directly from John Dalli himself”.

A recording of a telephone conversation, lasting 11 minutes, was played in court. The conversation is between Dalli’s henchman Silvio Zammit and an officer of a leading tobacco lobby which was pressing to have the ban on snus lifted across the European Union.

Zammit tells the tobacco lobbyist that he can guarantee a proposal to lift the ban and he can also organize high-level meetings “between your boss and my boss, one to one” to take place “between the mountains, on the ice, on the sun or the moon or wherever you want”. He then asks for 10 million euros and the tobacco lobby official expresses shock – not at the figure so much as the fact that payment is being requested at all for a meeting with a European Commissioner.

Zammit, a barely literate small-time fixer from Sliema’s Lazy Corner, and my exact contemporary, whose family were famous in our childhood for their excellent mqaret, cooked and sold off a stall on the front, told the tobacco lobby official in an attempt at justifying his and Dalli’s request for a 10-million-euro bribe: “For everything there is a price, Inge. At the end of the day there is a price. If they win they will get richer and richer in millions.”

The tobacco lobby official responds: “Did John say whether there is still enough time to make a change? There are a lot of rumours that it is too late.”

And Zammit tells her: “There are rumours everywhere, but the time is now.”