The executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology is mentally ill

If the Prime Minister does not divest him of his position in control of the Science Council – Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is, after all, a political appointee in charge of a non-political state council – then the Council’s board of directors should call an extraordinary meeting and force his resignation.

They are unlikely to do that because most of them are political appointees too and in the executive chairman’s pocket, as is the board secretary, a policeman-turned-small-time-criminal-lawyer and Muscat troll, Vince Micallef, who is there only because he is one of Pullicino Orlando’s closest associates and collaborators.

Pullicino Orlando is doing a great deal of damage to the reputation of the state council he leads, besides treating it as his personal domain, to the extent of putting his partially educated girlfriend – at the time, still his secret mistress – on the Science Council payroll as his “personal assistant to senior management”, and later promoting her to a position for which she is unqualified and unfit.

Now the executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology has taken a step further into disordered madness – if you don’t believe me, ask his two wives why they walked out, with the second one currently petitioning the courts to have the marriage annulled on grounds of violence, aggression and psychiatric problems – by filing a judicial protest in the Courts of Justice today, calling on the government and internet service providers to “stop annoyance blogs” (see below). He appears to believe he is living in North Korea.

The annoyance blog he has in mind is, of course, this one. His protest claims that reports of his visits abroad, or that he was at a restaurant, annoy him and expose him to the risk of crimes being committed against him, such as burglary. His “partner” is featured too, and she “is not in public life”, he claims.

To say that Lara Boffa, who featured heavily in the Labour Party’s 2013 electoral campaign, on its billboards and promotional videos, in her own name and not as an actor or model, is “not in public life” is farcical. She is still hard at it, and the fact that she was given a state council job and promotion because she was (and still is) in a relationship with the politically-appointed executive chairman definitely makes both her and her boyfriend the objects of public-interest scrutiny.

So what triggered Pullicino Orlando’s latest bout of paranoid bipolar insanity? It was this post about his trip to Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie. The photograph was not private. He had uploaded it himself on one of his several Facebook pages, and it was seen by thousands of his ‘Facebook friends’, one of whom sent it to me.

I suspect that what happened there is that when the self-important Pullicino Orlando saw that picture in the context of this website, as distinct from his self-glorifying Facebook page, he realised how ridiculous he looks in that picture, doing the tourist-trap thing at Checkpoint Charlie while saluting in a comedy hat with his foolish Science Council girlfriend.

His reaction to that post, last Sunday morning, was instantaneous and insane. Within minutes of uploading it, I received abusive messages from Pullicino Orlando via SMS and WhatsApp, and this despite the fact that for the last 18 months or so he has been under a police warning not to contact me. They had summoned him to the Mosta station and cautioned him after he sent me a stream of abusive messages.

Using the means of telecommunications to send people abusive messages is a crime.

Last Sunday, minutes after that post in which he felt ridiculed by the Checkpoint Charlie photograph which he himself had made public, the politically-appointed executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology sent me this message by SMS and then by WhatsApp:

Indannata……psikopatika…..kurnuta….sfigurata….u…….miskina.

Then another message immediately followed on WhatsApp from the executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology:

Just met your odiferous, sorry-excuse-for-a-human-being, bosom buddy…..antoine vella. Birds of a feather and all that…..?

Antoine Vella used to teach at the University of Malta but has since retired. I have met him only once, many years ago, and there is no way he can be described as my buddy, let alone my bosom buddy (though I would be proud to call somebody so decent, forthright and clear-thinking my friend, had our paths crossed sufficiently for that to have happened).

His hatred of Antoine Vella – who is, incidentally, a scientist – is another of Pullicino Orlando’s paranoid fixations, as is his obsession that Vella and I are somehow in cahoots (about what remains unclear).

Both Marlene Farrugia (now an independent MP) and Carmen Ciantar (now CEO at the Foundation for Medical Sciences and Services) are clear about the matter that their former/current husband needs psychiatric care. But the Prime Minister chose to get him off by his back by putting him in charge of an important state council instead.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is mentally ill. Yesterday, the deputy prime minister brought before parliament the government’s bill on ‘standards in public life’. If he and the Prime Minister really gave a damn about standards in public life – and as we know, they don’t – one of the first things they would do is show some respect for the Malta Council for Science and Technology, and the public and scientists it serves, by demanding the resignation of this unfit, disgraceful person.