Newspaper controlled by Keith Schembri’s midnight caller reaches fresh journalistic heights

When a newspaper is 50% owned and 100% controlled by a man who has 1am telephone conversations with Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s money-laundering chief of staff, you can expect anything from it.

Perhaps Saviour Balzan can reassure us that he hasn’t been receiving hundreds of thousands of euros from Keith Schembri, via a tangled web of offshore companies, bank accounts and financial services providers, as Adrian Hillman did between 2011 and 2015 (and that’s just the available documentation) when he was managing director at the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times.

If Schembri were Eddie Fenech Adami’s or Lawrence Gonzi’s chief of staff (Balzan hated and still hates them both), he would be howling 24/7 on the steps to the Auberge de Castille, making every edition of his newspaper a special edition dedicated to Schembri’s crimes and Schembri’s face.

Balzan doesn’t even think he owes his readers or his staff an explanation as to why Keith Schembri rang him at almost 1am on a Thursday/Friday night for a fairly long discussion.