Some more background on Bastjan Dalli

The email which he supposedly sent out to the press about the concrete (on his brother John’s email address) cannot possibly have been written by him.

Bastjan Dalli does not speak English and is barely literate even in Maltese. He left formal education while still in primary school and went to work in the family tea-shop at Cross Road, Marsa.

In the early 1980s he used to visit London regularly to do business with ‘the Maltese community’ (I thought I had best use a euphemism), even though he couldn’t speak English at all – not one word.

For a while, that business was buying stolen electronic goods and vehicles, and vans which had failed their MOT, and importing them into Malta with the backing of Lorry Sant and his henchmen. He carried on for a while after the Nationalist Party was elected to government in 1987, but then he realised that with his brother a government minister he could be on to bigger and better things and he began smuggling whisky and illegal drugs instead.

He also worked as his brother’s fixer in Libya in those Gaddafi days when his brother was, for almost 10 years, the minister or PS responsible for Malta’s business with Libya. I clearly remember that there was some kind of bad accident on a highway in Libya back then in those early years and Bastjan Dalli was found to have been travelling in the same car as his brother the minister. John Dalli’s explanation was that he was just giving his brother a lift, and why shouldn’t he. Perhaps he found him hitchhiking on the motorway to Tripoli.