Therese Comodini Cachia: “I said at the outset that the project is a scam and that’s exactly what I still think and will continue to say.”

Last night, I uploaded the company details for Sadeen Education Investment Ltd and Sadeen Rehabilitation Services (Malta) Ltd.

I was struck immediately by the fact that neither company is registered to its own office in Malta and that the address for the involved parties is a post office box in Jordan.

I had immediately recognised the address to which both companies are registered in Malta – 2 Cobalt House – as being that of the financial services company RSM (Malta). This means that Hani Hasan Naji Salah is a client of that firm, and that it registered his companies and will be advising him on related matters.

RSM is not some dodgy outfit. It is an international name and the partners in the Maltese office have a good and solid reputation. I already knew a couple of them but decided to look up the rest of the partners on their website.

I found that Vladimiro Comodini is one of them. He is married to Therese Comodini Cachia, the Nationalist MEP who is also the Opposition spokesman for education. My first thought was: “This is just (expletive deleted) unbelievable.”

My second thought was: “Therese Comodini Cachia has been banging on from the beginning about how this is a scam and how she’s suspicious of the investor and how she thinks he’s just after the land. So there’s no way she knows about it. Her husband won’t have told her, even though it impacts directly on her political career and credibility. Men can be such (expletive deleted). It probably didn’t even occur to him that it would have consequences for his wife and her political party.”

Comodini Cachia tore Education Minister Evarist Bartolo apart on the subject of the government’s involvement with this Jordanian investor and its plans to give him public land, on TVAM a few days ago. Can you imagine what it would have been like for her and for the political party/Opposition she represents if he had turned round and said to her: “You can talk, but he’s your husband’s client.”

But neither of them knew.

My third thought was one of immense irritation: that the Opposition spokesman for education and the Opposition itself, which is teeming with lawyers all of whom have a subscription to the Malta Financial Services Authority website, should have looked up the details for Sadeen Education Investment Ltd as soon as DePaul University released the company name (which the government had not done itself). Then they should have looked into the matter of the registered address to get as much information as they could.

If I, as a journalist, knew that this is the first thing to do and that it is crucial, then why do they, as politicians, not bother or even understand its importance?

The Opposition spokesman for education would not have needed to look up the address because she would have recognised it immediately as her husband’s office. I had a good mind to ring her up there and then, but it was 2am. This was a big story.

So I waited until this morning, and rang Therese Comodini Cachia.

“I uploaded the company details for Sadeen Education Investment Ltd last night and the company is registered to 2nd floor, Cobalt House, as is another one owned by Hani Hasan Naji Salah…”

“But that’s my husband’s office!”

“Yes, that’s exactly why I’m ringing you.”

“It must mean that they registered the company for him, and that…”

“Yes, that is the subject of my phone call.”

“Have you spoken to them?”

“No, I only realised last night and today is Saturday. And in any case, they can’t talk about clients – as we both know, no financial services company can do that. I suspected that you didn’t know and that’s why I rang you. But this is a story and I am going to write about it, so I will want a statement from you about your position.”

“The first thing I must do is inform Simon Busuttil immediately. I’ll try to reach him now, then I’ll ring you back and answer your questions. But I want you to know straight away that I believe this project to be a scam, and I am not going to stop saying so.”

Shortly afterwards, Therese Comodini Cachia rang me back, saying that she had informed Busuttil. “Now I am going to tell you what I think, and please quote me,” she said. My transcript of her verbal statement follows:

“Whatever my husband’s office involvement is, that is not going to change my opinion of the matter. I reacted immediately saying that I think it is a scam, a way of giving this man a large amount of public land in a prime area near the sea, and I shall continue to say so.

“He is a hotel developer. He does not operate colleges or universities. Hotel operators do not diversify into the college or fee-paying university business.

“The very day the contract was signed, I issued a press release questioning it. I was on TVAM the following morning, with the Education Minister, saying that I believe the whole thing is being sold as a scam. It is either the hotel operator scamming the government, or the government scamming the public, or both.

“I am utterly against the use of pristine land for this project or anything similar. But the fact that the project is being sold as a scam only makes the plans to give them pristine land even worse. Why does a university have to be on prime land with beautiful views, next to the sea?

“If the government were truly interested in having a fee-paying university, then it would have opened up the project to calls for proposals in a transparent manner, and with a level playing-field, and may the best one win. That would have been in the public interest, but I don’t think it is the public interest they are concerned with here.

“I also think this is a scam for immigration purposes, that they are somehow going to use it to bring people into the European Union on student visas issued by Malta. I think this is a scam from beginning to end.

“I have serious concerns, too, about the academic aspect, standards, everything, about how this will impact negatively on the reputation of Malta’s own academic institutions.

“To the question of how I can fight against this project and call it a scam when the investor is a client of my husband’s office and I am benefiting from that, I will say this: no, I am not benefiting from it. My husband and I have separate estates and I insisted on doing this before we married and not afterwards. I told my husband that I didn’t want to be married under the default regime of community of acquests, that I would not feel comfortable with that and that I wanted to be completely independent financially. Marriage, I told him, does not mean that a woman becomes her husband’s slave and dependent. It frightens me how many Maltese women depend financially on their husband, how some even marry to be financially dependent.

“I will repeat what I said at the outset and what I shall continue to say. I believe this is a scam and I have yet to be convinced otherwise.”