Mario Demarco should go out of his way to publicly distance himself from Keith Schembri instead of doing the opposite of that

There has been a strange show of alliance between the Labour Party/government and one of the Nationalist Party’s deputy leaders, Mario Demarco, over the last few days. We were even subjected to the unsavoury spectacle of Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s corrupt chief of staff, posting a message of support on Demarco’s Facebook page, and Demarco returning the compliment in an interview he gave to the Times of Malta.

Why doesn’t anybody see anything peculiar in the way the Labour Party never touches Mario Demarco, that quite to the contrary it actually goes out of its way to support him? From the way they talk, you’d think he was a Labour politician, one of theirs.

People’s minds just don’t work on this island. They don’t join the dots. They never see what’s staring them in the face, even if it has pink bells on, but then they believe conspiracy theories, and the more outlandish, the better.

Mario Demarco and Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s corrupt chief of staff, have Adrian Hillman, the corrupt former managing direct of Allied Newspapers Ltd, in common – though not for the same reasons. If you want to read up on the backstory to Adrian Hillman’s corruption with Keith Schembri, or maybe you’ve forgotten already, just enter his name into the search box at the top of this page.

Mario Demarco and Adrian Hillman have been best friends all their lives, and it was Mario Demarco’s father who installed Hillman at Allied Newspapers and had him anointed as the single replacement for both Progress Press’s Wilfred Asciak and Allied Newspapers’ Ronnie Agius when they retired.

Demarco had no knowledge of Hillman’s corruption and the exact nature of his friendship with the Labour Party’s Keith Schembri, though there is no way he couldn’t have known that there was a close relationship. Did he never wonder about it?

Demarco has since broken off all contact with Hillman because of the massive betrayal of trust. But the fact remains that Keith Schembri was never going to direct the Labour Party to launch any kind of onslaught on Demarco as long as he was best friends with his corrupt associate, Hillman. He is still protecting Demarco now, as we can see from the comment he left on his Facebook page. And this only makes me wonder who knows what about whom among those three people.

We still don’t know exactly what is going on beneath the surface there, and nobody – not the Nationalist Party, not the Times of Malta and certainly not the Labour Party – seems to have any interest in reminding people that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was involved in corrupt dealings with the managing director of Malta’s most influential newspaper and printing press during the years 2011 to 2015, which covered an extremely turbulent period in politics and also the 2013 general election campaign.

The Nationalist Party’s deputy leader has no interest in reminding people about this massive scandal because one of the people involved was his best friend, a very painful situation for him at a personal level, and the Labour Party wants people to forget because it involves the Prime Minister’s corrupt chief of staff. And for obvious reasons, it’s a story the Times of Malta is not going to keep alive.

Malta Today, for reasons that remain unclear, never touches Keith Schembri and didn’t even go after him when his web of secret companies was revealed. This is how situations turn foul in Malta, with a great conspiracy of silence about the most dangerous people, while those who shouldn’t be persecuted by the press and politicians are.

Keith Schembri

Adrian Hillman

Mario Demarco should work to publicly disassociate himself from any suspicion of links to, respect for or friendship withmKeith Schembri and Adrian Hillman, and not do the opposite by accepting compliments from Schembri and publicly supporting the corrupt individual in return.