ED ZL probably wasn’t using his official email address

The Times of Malta reported this morning that the Tourism Minister, ED ZL, made a bit of a mess when he sent an email to the Ministry’s permanent secretary, Mario Rodgers, which was intended for the head of the civil service, Mario Cutajar. The fact that the email was about replacing Rodgers, without his having been told that he would be replaced, only made things worse.

But this indicates that ED ZL wasn’t using his official gov.mt email address, as he is duty-bound to do for correspondence of that nature, but a personal address. The gov.mt email system allows you to recall emails which you send out, and if they haven’t been read yet, then they cannot be read at all once you recall them.

So if the newspaper has reported correctly that ED ZL realised his mistake immediately, then all he had to do was recall the email. But he did not. Perhaps, not being terribly tech-savvy, he doesn’t known about message recall. But I think it more likely that, like the Prime Minister and the Education Minister, he was using his personal email address to hatch his dastardly plots and schemes with the head of the civil service, who may or may not have been doing the same.

Using their personal email addresses appears to be dictated, rather than random, practice in the cabinet. I think it would be obvious why. They want to avoid the very thing that mandatory use of gov.mt email addresses is designed to do: create a permanent record of exchanges, to which even future governments and civil servants will have access if necessary. That is meant to be a good thing, but this government sees it as a bad one.

From this

to this in just three years