National Audit Office slams unauthorised payments and freeloading at Malta Science Council

The National Audit Office has just released a report in which the Malta Council for Science and Technology is shown to have been making unauthorised payments to employees, with documentation either missing, never having existed, or deliberately not shown to the auditors. The situation regarding the council’s financial controller is also highly questionable.

The National Audit Office also reports that the Malta Council for Science and Technology is not keeping attendance records for any of its employees, and that “a high-ranking officer” who is entitled under his contract to 150 litres of fuel every month is instead being handed €2,484 in cash every year. The same official is also given more than €4,000 a year for using his own car.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, responded to the publication of the National Audit Office’s report by uploading this on Facebook. Bear in mind that two years ago he should have been celebrating his first wedding anniversary with his second wife, who he claims was the reason he kicked up such a fuss about divorce, so as to be able to marry her.

But instead of celebrating his first anniversary, he was putting this girlfriend on the state payroll at the science council. Love? She, perhaps. But not him. Narcissists are clinically incapable of that selfless emotion – and quite frankly, the state of his face in this photograph speaks volumes about just how happy he is.

The last time he looked that way it was June 2012 in the run-up to a second marriage he felt he couldn’t get out of because he had held the entire nation hostage to his supposed pressing desire for it.

I’ll bet that Muscat would love to get shot of him now that his usefulness has evaporated, but is too frightened of the inevitable fall-out, given that he well knows how unstable Pullicino Orlando is and how obsessed with vengeance.