Muscat-appointed executive chairman nominates girlfriend as ‘national contact point’ for EU programme
The executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, has nominated his girlfriend Lara Boffa, who he put on the council payroll in 2013 when he began seeing her while still living with his second wife, as Malta’s national contact point (NCP) for the EU’s research programme Horizon 2020.
Miss Boffa, who joined the Science Council as her boyfriend’s personal assistant but was promoted soon after to the post of projects officer, will be the national contact point for information and communication technologies, nanotechnologies, advanced materials and advanced manufacturing and processing, and health, demographic change and wellbeing.
She has no background in the sciences or scientific training. The nomination will have had to be approved by the Education Ministry, which holds the Science Council in its portfolio. The Education Minister, Evarist Bartolo, is a very close friend and associate of Pullicino Orlando’s and they worked together on the divorce campaign leading up to the referendum.
Miss Boffa has since been confirmed in the post.
This appointment is disgraceful on two main counts. The first is that Miss Boffa is involved in an official sexual relationship with the Science Council’s executive chairman, which means that even if she were fully qualified for the post, she should have held back in the interest of visible impartiality and transparency (and she should not be working at the same organisation in the first place, precisely for those reasons).
The second is that she is manifestly unqualified. The national contact point has to provide scientists, researchers and organisations in Malta with, among other things, guidance on choosing the relevant H2020 topics and types of action, advice on administrative procedures and contractual issues, training and assistance in the writing of proposals, dissemination of documentation, and assistance in partner search.
One scientist who alerted this website to the shocking development said: “I can’t imagine how the executive chairman’s choice of NCP – his girlfriend – is going to deal with requests for advice on robotics, photonics, cyber-physical systems, advanced materials for high efficiency solar energy harvesting, novel supply chains for innovative product-services, and the nanoformulation of biologicals. We hope Miss Boffa will soon organise regular and relevant ‘information days’ to help Malta’s industrial and research base in applying for funding – of course, on her own steam and by doing the job she is paid to do, and not by inviting EC officers to deliver presentations on her behalf because she is unable to do so herself.”
These are some examples of the sort of technical calls Lara Boffa, who is untrained and suffers from certain manifest intellectual challenges, besides being politically motivated and untrustworthy, will have to handle.
