The Prime Minister has a new aide

And he’d better keep a close watch on the office petty cash. Karl Stagno Navarra was put on the payroll at Malta Enterprise in April 2014, for the very vague purpose of ‘coordinating’ Malta’s participation and stand at the Milan Expo, which ran from May to October the following year.

When the expo ended six months ago, the former Bay Radio, Net TV, Al Jazeera and Malta Today reporter – who still works as an occasional stringer for Bloomberg (he probably hasn’t told them that he is on the official government payroll) – began going about town in Brussels, telling women he hoped to impress in bars that he works for the Prime Minister of Malta and is “very close to him”. These women thought it was just another pick-up line – real prime ministerial aides aren’t that stupid, they reasoned, unless they’re from the Third World – but it turns out to be true.

Joseph Muscat even took him to Italy this week, along with Keith Schembri and Kurt Farrugia, though we know that, for some reason, he wasn’t sitting in Club Class or in the back of a Ford Focus with them.