Magistrate Consuelo Herrera: the matter has got nothing to do with Ian Castaldi Paris or the Lija council

This story in Malta Today is completely wrong. The newspaper asked the prime minister why he didn’t make Magistrate Herrera a judge (a good question, incidentally, though I knew the answer to that already as it happens), and he replied that it’s because proceedings in her regard have not yet been concluded by the Commission for the Administration of Justice.

Malta Today automatically assumed that the proceedings are in relation to a controversy in which Magistrate Herrera was involved in the Lija mayor’s office around seven years ago, when she went there about something to do with the development of a block of flats. This was all guess work because the Commission’s proceedings are not made public.

No, the proceedings are not in relation to that.

They are in relation to what I said in court around three years ago, about Magistrate Herrera’s extra-curricular activities with police officers, and one senior (married) police officer in particular. This was when the police, under Magistrate Herrera’s personal instructions, prosecuted me for criminal defamation. The ordeal included finding police waiting for me at the gate to our house at 1.30am on a Saturday morning – which is in contravention of the sunset to sundown rule, I believe – with a summons to go to police headquarters at 9am that same day for interrogation (which took four hours during which I was prevented from leaving).

The facts I mentioned in court, and which Magistrate Herrera did not know I knew, caused her to drop the charges against me immediately.

I know for a fact that the proceedings against Magistrate Herrera, before the Commissioner for the Administration of Justice, are about her covert behaviour with members of the police force, or one senior officer in particular, because I have already testified twice before the Commission for the Administration of Justice on this matter over the last few months.

I wasn’t planning on saying anything about this. I haven’t even mentioned it to anyone in conversation, let alone written about it, because you are supposed to maintain discretion in public regarding proceedings before the Commission. But seeing as the prime minister himself has breached that discretion, leading to incorrect reportage and speculation in Malta Today – understandable, given that they don’t have the information – I think I should put the record straight.

Also, between the Lija mayor case and this one, Magistrate Herrera appeared before the Commission for the Administration of Justice on yet another matter: a report made by a man in Gozo who was, for a time, acting for the heirs of the notorious Charlie l-Likk (‘king of Gozo’) that she had conspired with a lawyer-friend of hers to engineer the purchase by him of a piece of property at a favourable price to the detriment of the man who made the report. I don’t know the outcome of that. I only know the basis on which the report was made (not by devious means, but directly from the man who made the report), and have no idea whether it was justified or not.