Former Demarco campaign aides kicked out of Nationalist Party for Freemasonry now accompanying Adrian Delia on party club visits

Newsbook reports today that two men who accompanied Nationalist Party leadership contender Adrian Delia and his wife, on a visit to a Nationalist Party club last weekend, were kicked out of the Nationalist Party two years ago when it was discovered that they are Freemasons.

The men are Olvin Galea and Jonathan Pace, and both were campaign aides to Mario Demarco, who has been the party’s deputy leader over the last four years, in the 2013 general election. Demarco dismissed them when the news broke.

The discovery that they are Freemasons, which led to their expulsion from the political party, was made when Malta Today published a news story on Maltese Freemasonry, accompanied by a few photographs that included the one below, of members of one lodge. The two men were identified from the photograph. The Nationalist Party does not permit its members or officials to be Freemasons and has a strict policy against membership of any secret society.

When Newsbook rang Delia to ask him whether he knows that the two men accompanying him are Freemasons, he claimed not to do so, and said that he is not a Freemason himself. But on that particular occasion, he was also accompanied by Jean Pierre Debono, who has been working hard to have him elected, and his wife Kristy. Debono has been the Nationalist Party’s assistant secretary-general for the last nine years, and will have known that the two men had their links to the party severed because of their Freemasonry.

In the lodge photograph below, one of the men in the back row, wearing dark glasses, is Hugh Anastasi, who in the 2013 general election campaign lent his house to the Labour Party to use as a location for its most famous campaign video, featuring parents and two daughters: “Dad, jien se nivvota Labour”.

Mario Demarco with Olvin Galea and Jonathan Pace, during the 2013 general election campaign in which they were his aides. Galea and Pace were thrown out of the Nationalist Party two years later when a newspaper published a photograph that revealed them to be Freemasons.