Hillman/Schembri scandal: Prime Minister’s Office gives Allied Newspapers €800,000 tender for EU Presidency “marketing and communications”

When Allied Newspapers/Progress Press managing director Adrian Hillman was appointed chairman of the Commonwealth Business Forum 2015 on the ‘recommendation’ of CHOGM Organising Committee CEO Phyllis Muscat and her close friend Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, there were other corrupt manoeuvres going on beneath the surface.

A few days after the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting ended, the government announced a call for tender submissions for “the provision of marketing and communication services for Malta’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2017”. The submission period opened on 4 December 2015 and closed on 14 January 2016.

The winning bid was for €797,000, submitted by ‘Etoile Malta-Allied Newspapers JV’. Nobody in the know, in the business, was surprised that the tender went to Allied Newspapers, given the highly suspect relationship between Keith Schembri and Adrian Hillman.

But the tender bid itself was shocking in other ways, and is the most blatantly offensive proof – right there, in black and white – of how the government, through Schembri’s shady backroom negotiations, ‘bought’ the media for favourable coverage.

Given what has transpired since, it is safe to assume that there was corruption in this deal, not for Allied Newspapers as a company, but for Hillman himself, along with Schembri. Allied Newspapers is a newspaper group and not a public relations and marketing agency, and it should have NEVER tendered for something like that. Its newspapers, the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times, are expected by their readers to report freely and without bias on matters related to the EU Presidency, which is even now mired in controversy about not enough being done to prepare and panic stations as the 11th hour approaches.

How can the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times be expected to report freely about the EU Presidency, and how can their readers be certain that what they are reading is not public relations puff pieces, when their owning company is handling the public relations for the EU Presidency against payment of €797,000?

Of course, Keith Schembri’s plans for wonderful coverage about the EU Presidency, made even better by a couple of kickbacks against invoice from one of his companies in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Gibraltar or Panama, were blown up when Allied Newspapers’ board of directors forced Hillman to resign.

I have now heard through the media/advertising/PR industry grapevine that the government is in dispute with Allied Newspapers over this tender. The nature of this dispute is not clear, but I would suspect that the government now has no interest in Allied Newspapers doing it, and doesn’t want to work with Allied Newspapers on it anyway, because Keith Schembri is at war with them both at a personal/political level and because they appear to have terminated his supply contracts.

But Allied Newspapers should get out of it anyway. The reporting work of its journalists about the EU Presidency, however good, will be perceived with suspicion by readers. And in the current climate, that would be all wrong. Preparations for the EU Presidency are rumoured to be a total mess, and the sooner that the newspapers get on to the subject, the better for us all.

This is the link to the tender announcement.