Karmenu Vella: milking his political connections for personal advantage, to the last breath

Karmenu Vella, now chairman of the Orange Travel Group and shadow minister of finance, with his hero Dom Mintoff in the Golden Years of Malta's worst misery after WWII

When Sam Mifsud was chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority, he was targeted repeatedly by the Labour Party for a number of things.

Primarily, the Labour Party was irritated by the fact that he owned and ran a travel company – SMS – which put him in a position of conflict of interest.

For once, the Labour Party was right about this. Sam Mifsud did have a major conflict of interest and should never have been appointed to that position.

There were other reasons why he shouldn’t have been made Malta Tourism Authority chairman, but let’s not go into them.

Labour’s arguments, however, were seriously undermined by another fact which should have been drawn into the equation.

When Karmenu Vella lost his job as minister for tourism as Sant’s government had collapsed, he was promptly given another one as chairman of Corinthia Hotels International, a position he continued to hold while serving as the Opposition’s spokesman/shadow minister for tourism.

And now things have been neatly sewn up.

Sam Mifsud is no longer chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority. Karmenu Vella is no longer chairman of Corinthia Hotels International.

SMS has merged with Mondial (owned by Martin Degiorgio of the now defunct Far Right and anti-immigrant political group ANR) to form the Orange Travel Group, and they’ve brought in Labour’s former tourism spokesman and current shadow minister of finance as chairman.

They have also made Karmenu Vella a director of Orange Travel Group Ltd and Orange Travel (Russia) Ltd. The information is right there in the Companies Register.

Because, you know, he’s so talented and has such an incisive mind, as we saw from his performance on Bondi+ and his other performance at the Labour general conference (see previous post, video).

He has a lot of value to bring to the business.

So you have, at the Orange Travel Group: Karmenu Vella as chairman, Martin Degiorgio as managing director, and the Mifsud brothers Sam and Simon as directors. For good measure, they’ve also brought in former Air Malta CEO Joe Capello.

Joe Capello is listed on the company’s website as one of the directors. He is not listed as a director in the company information at the Companies Registry. Perhaps there is a reason for this, which will eventually become clear.

And the Labour Party’s newspaper, KullHadd, has of course sewn up its lips.