Today’s top comment

Carol Peralta

Posted by Justine:

So finally a dreadful chapter in the not-so-shining history of the Maltese judiciary comes to an end.

Magistrate Peralta can claim the distinction of being the only member of the judiciary to have faced impeachment TWICE, and in any decent democracy he would have faced it a third and a fourth time too.

First Parliament tried to impeach him on a motion piloted by Wenzu Mintoff, when Mintoff represented Alternattiva Demokratika in Parliament, with specific charges of the grossest judicial CORRUPTION.

Later, Prime Minister Fenech Adami presented a separate motion of impeachment, charging him with criminal activity.

Impeachment motions of judges and magistrates require the support of two-thirds of the House of Representatives to pass.

On both occasions, Magistrate Peralta repaired under the Labour umbrella for protection, and was instantly welcomed there.

It was then that he switched and loudly joined the Labour skip.

He was then sent to the Balkans – simply to get him out of the way. Malta, as it often does, exported its problem.

Now he has had other charges of judicial misbehaviour against him in the Commission for the Administration of Justice, following his drunken Christmas party in a courtroom, with the bench used as a bar, in which, or so one witness testified before the Commission, he gripped his fly or belt-buckle with both hands and told a reporter that he would show him he’s a man and not a woman called Carol.

With such a unique record, it is remarkable he was not promoted to the judges’ bench.

The “disappointments and disillusions” he mentions are not his. They are of the honest members of the judiciary whose good name he has polluted.

They are of the honest citizens who for years had to suffer a travesty of the administration of justice
he had been delegated to promote.

Magistrate Peralta was one of the few who managed the feat of being both shameful and shameless at the same time.

And, if he is joining Palumbo, we know their aprons are made from the same cloth.