Deputy Opposition leader’s client calls me a “corrupt liar and hypocrite”, hurls threats and insults

I rang Silvio Debono, the corrupt businessman for whom the Opposition deputy leader and at least one Nationalist MP work, to ask him why he picked them in particular out of all the lawyers in Malta. His line was busy.

Five minutes later he rang back, not knowing who it was who had rung him. It’s Daphne Caruana Galizia, I said. There was a frozen silence, before he asked me, in terse tones, to go ahead.

I asked him exactly that question. “It’s because I pick the best lawyers in Malta,” he said. “I always go for the best people, whatever I do.” The best, or the best to serve your interests?

Next time come and see my presentation, he said. But you didn’t even come and yet you call me corrupt. I’ll see you in court for that. (All this in bogan-style rougher-than-rough Maltese, and not as written here.)

This is not about the project, I said. It’s about the fact that you got the land in the first place. I’m quite happy to see you in court. It should be interesting.

Within seconds he escalated to hysterics, shouting, insulting me, calling me a corrupt hypocrite and saying the kind of Godawful things that don’t bear repeating here. He sounded exactly like somebody having a fight in a cheap bar in the lower reaches of the inner harbour area, at 2am after a night of drinking.

He was awful. The deputy leader of the Opposition party is working for somebody like that? Disgraceful.

I have a massive, scandalous story about how Silvio Debono travelled abroad this week to buy a very flashy car and who it was he took with him, and when I told him point blank about the facts that are known to me, he froze again and his only response was “Dik bicca tieghi.”

I pointed out that it is not “bicca tieghu” at all because the other person is a very, very senior public official appointed by the Muscat government to one of the most sensitive posts in the public service despite the fact that he had been sacked from the police force by Commissioner Rizzo some years ago, for just this kind of sleazy behaviour, the sort of senior public official who is obliged to maintain his distance from people like Debono, and he went nuts again.

The whole bunch of them should resign en masse. I have never seen so much corruption since 1985. I am truly revolted. And I have finally understood what very dangerous people I am dealing with here.

Corrupt businessman Silvio Debono with one of Economy Minister Christian Cardona’s ‘people of trust’, Jonathan Attard, at his wedding.