Retired multi-millionairess paid €34,700 a year in public funds to advise Minister Farrugia on poverty

Multi-millionairess Joan Bland nee Mintoff is being paid €34,700 a year out of public funds to advise the Family Minister on how to combat poverty

A candid shot of Joan Bland nee Mintoff suffering the effects of poverty at a knees-up.

Joan Bland, 64, (stage name: Yana Mintoff Bland) one of dead former prime minister Dom Mintoff’s two daughters and a failed (disastrously) Labour candidate in the last general election, is being paid €34,700 a year in public funds to advise Family and Social Policy Minister Michael Farrugia “on poverty”.

The information has been given in parliament in response to a question put by Opposition MP Kristy Debono.

Bland is a retired headmistress who hasn’t lived in Malta since early childhood in the late 1950s. She returned to Malta on her retirement from her school job in the United States, just over three years ago, which coincided with the death of her father.

She and her sister Anna McKenna inherited an estate worth millions from their father, a notorious miser who kept his wife in penury.

In 2012, Bland and McKenna sold a tract of land in Tarxien, to a company owned by Charles ‘Ic-Caqnu’ Polidano, for €3.6 million. They have since been litigating over garages, land and houses, and are even pursuing more compensation from public funds, having taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights (the unbelievable irony) because they say that the almost €1 million they and their father received for ‘pain, suffering and loss of the view’ at their Delimara house is nowhere near enough.

The money was not compensation for having the house requisitioned, but compensation for the ordeal of having a power station built close to it. They actually kept the house and have it still.

What Joan Bland aka Yana Mintoff Bland knows about Malta or poverty is anybody’s guess.

Though she had to watch her mother suffer acute poverty at her father’s hands – today that is recognised as a form of spousal abuse and is subject to prosecution – she has never actually known poverty herself. Nor has she known Malta.

Bland and her sister were removed from Malta as children in the late 1950s when their mother left their father, fled to England and began proceedings for divorce. Mintoff asked for the assistance of British politicians in persuading her to return.

Mrs Mintoff eventually did return, but their daughters stayed at school in England and then went to university there. Bland never returned to live in Malta, but only visited from time to time.