Just in case you missed these
These are the latest developments in the case of the prime minister’s human tool, put in charge of the two ministries where most ‘tahwid’ is going on: health (from which Godfrey Farrugia was removed so that ‘tahwid’ in privatisation could go forward) and energy (friends-of-friends power station, oil deals with Baku, deals with Algeria, and more).
I wish to make it clear that in my view the Health/Energy Minister’s marriage and any other romantic relationship are of public interest only because his wife decided to leave him and return to her home country with their children.
This in turn led to the creation of a taxpayer-funded government job for her in Shanghai, and also the setting up of a Maltese consulate for which EU funds were used – a job and a consulate which did not exist at the time she took her decision to leave, and which did not exist for two years after she left Malta. The consulate only opened last July.
This made it possible for Mrs Mizzi to return to her home country with their children, in comfort and without litigation, and also without the Health/Energy Minister having to maintain his wife and children in their new home.
The specific creation of this publicly-funded job for Mrs Mizzi, for which there is as yet no job description or telephone number, and the circumstances which led to it, make this a public interest issue.
Had Mrs Mizzi simply upped and left and gone back to China, finding her own job or receiving maintenance from her husband, then none of this would really be any of our business because marriages, sadly, break down all the time and cabinet ministers are not immune to that. It would be simply and unhappily a case of another one biting the dust.
So to make my point even clearer still: this is not a story about sex or marital breakdown. This is a story about corruption. It is worth adding, given the context of corruption, that Miss Gambin is not a civil servant or somebody who got to work at Konrad Mizzi’s ministry through an open interview process. Until March 2013 she was a reporter with the Labour Party’s television station and was then immediately handpicked by Minister Mizzi for transfer to the state payroll in his private secretariat, to a ‘position of trust’ as his communications coordinator in which she does a great deal of overtime work in the evenings.
