XTra Hdura – damage limitation for the Minister of the Economy

Fifteen minutes into Saviour Balzan’s XTra on TVM and I’m already glad I had the presence of mind to tell them politely where they can shove their live phone-in.

Are Beppe Fenech Adami and Chris Cardona supposed to be equal guests, because so far all I have seen is Balzan focussing on Cardona and allowing him to run on saying what he pleases uninterrupted, while Fenech Adami is shoved to the side as a prop.

Imbasta ‘independent journalism’ – and then Jeremy Paxman starts off from the point of not believing that Chris Cardona spent Monday night in a Velbert brothel, purely because I was the one who reported that he did.

“Permess ta’ blogs”

“Certu blogs”

“Daphne Caruana Maliz…Galizia”

I mean, really.

And Balzan is just letting that shameless fraud, the Minister for the Economy, run on and on and on and on, insulting me and slandering me. This is the man, may I remind you all, who has been spending a large chunk of his time in lap-dancing clubs IN MALTA ITSELF since way before he became a cabinet minister or deputy leader of the Labour Party.

Even his Labour Party colleagues believe he was in that brothel, because it’s so true to form. But obviously, Balzan lives on another planet, the sort of planet where he still doesn’t believe that Keith Schembri and Adrian Hillman were up to anything criminal and corrupt, because I was the one who broke the story about their offshore companies first. So even though all the documents were later released right there in the Mossack Fonseca cache, staring him in the face, he’s still sticking up for them.

Balzan is so obviously in their pocket – and this doesn’t mean they’re paying him – that he’s currently a rival for that Marquesa Wotsit of Hello magazine: “So, Chris, what do you have to say about these terrible accusations made against your fine character? And when you’ve done telling us, won’t you show us around your lovely home?”

Apparently, Cardona is concerned about the effect on his family. What family – the one where the wife threw him out because of his sordid behaviour? Or the one with the other wife he divorced to marry this wife? Ridiculous gutter-dweller.