Update on Manuel Mallia and Codruta Cristian: they married in July 2012

Manuel Mallia

Codruta Cristian

I have finally managed to obtain the marriage certificate details of our former police minister. He and Codruta Cristian, a Romanian citizen, were married by the civil rite in Valletta on 21 July 2012.

The groom, freshly divorced from his Maltese wife (the marriage had broken down around 25 years earlier) under the legislation enacted the previous year, was – and still is – almost 30 years older than the bride, who was born in 1979.

At the time of their marriage they had three children: twin sons and a daughter. The daughter, who was adopted from Cambodia, was born in October 2010, which means she was just three and four years old when left routinely in the care, at night, of her adoptive father’s gun-toting, Red-Bull-guzzling driver and his mother at her flat in Gzira.

My search for this information was triggered by a story reported in the newspapers yesterday that the health department is chasing Elena Codruta Cristian for 3,000 euros billed in December 2008, for treatment she received at Mater Dei Hospital, and that she is refusing to pay up despite a garnishee order having been placed on her bank account, after the health department took legal action.

She is not claiming that it isn’t she who owes the money because she didn’t receive the treatment, but that it’s not she who owes the money because the name on the bill doesn’t match the name on her passport.

It is in fact her. She was billed by the health department because, as I surmised on this website yesterday, she was neither a Maltese citizen at the time nor married to one, and didn’t have a European Health Insurance Card which might have covered her under certain circumstances as a citizen of another EU member state.

The health department issued the bill in December 2008, but it doesn’t follow that this is when the treatment took place. Something told me that it might actually be the bill for the delivery of her twin sons by Mallia, so I had somebody run a check on that, and sure enough, the twins were born on 16 October 2008 at Mater Dei Hospital.

Now it might well be that the health department issued another bill to Elena Codruta Cristian for the delivery of her twins, which Manuel Mallia had the good grace to pay because, after all, she was his girlfriend and he had fathered those children. And the December bill might have been for something else that cost 3,000 euros +.

But somehow, I don’t think so. If Mallia knew he was going to have to pay anyway, he would have chosen a private hospital. He chose Mater Dei Hospital because he thought it would be free, not realizing that when a woman enters hospital to deliver a child, she is the patient.

So it’s looking very likely that what we have here is a situation in which a cabinet minister, five/six years down the line, was holding out on the health department, refusing to pay the 3,000+ euros the mother of his children owed for the care she received at the state hospital when those children were delivered.

This is, of course, quite typical. Regular readers of this website will know that when his daughter reached school age last year, he entered her into the church schools lottery and competed for a free place with parents who can’t afford the fees at private schools.

They will also have seen the photographs I uploaded some weeks ago, of the (ex) Police Minister and Codruta Cristian shopping for their children’s clothes at a market stall in Catania, armed with a suitcase on wheels in which they were carrying their booty.

My regular readers will know, too, that I had received a communication from a former skivvy in the Mallia household, who had fled back to Romania because she couldn’t take the conditions under which they made her work and live. There was “no food or water in the house”, she told me. She was made to go to the old wall-fountain at the Mainguard every evening to fill up jerry-cans with water that she then had to use to wash the floors and clothes and to fill the baths. The lady of the house screamed at her non-stop and allowed her very little food.

And the entire nation knows by now what they do for free babysitting.