Broadcasting Authority chairman is a close associate of corrupt and disgraced politician John Dalli

The Nationalist Party has said it will sue the Broadcasting Authority chairman if she persists with her decision to ban all references to Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s secret Panama operations in the three minutes of airtime on TVM’s Dissett awarded by the Broadcasting Authority’s decision.

The three minutes of airtime are compensation for all the airtime given to Konrad Mizzi on that show to talk away about his “noble intentions” in setting up his Panama company.

The Nationalist Party should go ahead and sue the chairman, Tanya Borg Cardona, and also challenge her appointment to the post, for which she is demonstrably and manifestly unfit at a professional level, besides being politically compromised.

Mrs Borg Cardona has absolutely no background in broadcasting, media or communications, or really in anything at all. She has secondary-level education, no career history and has spent most of her adult life as little more than a housewife, for the last two decades at least living off a British man called David Newman who worked and might still work for the disgraced and corrupt John Dalli, and who was rumoured to hold his secret and unofficial business interests when he was Finance Minister.

Mr Newman and Mrs Borg Cardona left for England in the 1990s after their mobile phone retail business went bust, leaving a trail of creditors in Malta. They returned with mysterious connections to John Dalli, an ‘international’ fibre-optic business that came out of nowhere, and overflowing with money. Dalli, then Finance Minister whose decisions were dogged by allegations and suspicion of corruption, even made Newman a director of the Malta Development Corporation. This was before Malta became a member of the European Union and when Newman, a British subject, had no freedom of movement in the country.

Both David Newman and Tanya Borg Cardona worked assiduously to have John Dalli elected leader of the Nationalist Party, and when that failed, they turned against Lawrence Gonzi and the PN, and Mrs Borg Cardona began sowing bitterness and vengeance.

Mrs Borg Cardona spent the run-up to the 2013 general election, particularly, bad-mouthing anything and everyone connected with the Nationalist Party, which means that she cannot in any way be considered an impartial chairman of something as politically sensitive as the Broadcasting Authority, one of whose main functions is to ensure political impartiality in public services broadcasting, an embattled field at the best of times. It is impossible to trust her decisions, both at a professional level and at the level of political impartiality.

She was given the post, almost three years after the Labour Party was voted into office, as a highly irresponsible ‘iced bun’ to keep her quiet because she had been left with nothing while other Muscat lackeys had been given sinecures and appointments. She had been making it known to friends and associates that she had hoped for something connected with Malta’s EU presidency next year. However, as an untrained and unskilled housewife in her 60s, with no career history, she is not qualified for anything of the sort, certainly not for the position of Broadcasting Authority chairman and even less for anything connected with the EU presidency – not that this has ever stopped Muscat’s government from making disastrous and irresponsible appointments.