“Joke among friends”? The hospital CEO is lying.

Read this story first, otherwise you won’t know what I’m talking about.

I don’t believe Ivan Falzon. The Times of Malta story is incomplete. It leaves out the salient information that Falzon was a Labour councillor in Qala for six years, that he was Franco Mercieca’s main electoral canvasser, and that when Labour came to power in March 2013, he left his clerical job at Air Malta to become Mercieca’s secretariat chief of staff. Mercieca was then Parliamentary Secretary for the Elderly and the Disabled.

When Mercieca left that position because of his thriving eye surgery business, Konrad Mizzi, who was then Health Minister already, took Falzon in as his “consultant on hospital bed stock”. Mizzi – who has since been revealed to be Malta’s Minister for Corruption – then appointed him state hospital CEO, replacing the previous incumbent, whose contract was terminated. That was two years ago.

Ivan Falzon is, to put it bluntly, a servant of the Triad. He had none of the qualifications required to run a large general hospital – he had only ever worked as a clerk at Air Malta – but he does have the qualifications required to work for Konrad Mizzi. We all know by now what those are.

A few days ago, when Mercieca launched an assault on me in parliament because I broke the story of Keith Schembri’s illness and prolonged absence from the office, there was something so odd and so personal about it that it occurred to me like a flash that Mercieca is somehow involved with the Triad, even though he has spent the past few months, since the Panama Papers story broke, telling people connected to the Nationalist Party how corrupt Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are, and that Joseph Muscat obviously owns Egrant Inc.

I had forgotten that Konrad Mizzi handpicked Mercieca’s chief of staff and vote-canvasser to fill the position of Mater Dei Hospital CEO. This report about the fund-raising text messages is a timely reminder, and further evidence that Mercieca is closely linked to those crooks, and in their trust.

There’s something else that’s profoundly wrong with the report in the Times of Malta. It doesn’t examine the technical aspect, though that is the crucial point on which Falzon’s story is built. He would have us believe that a friend picked up his phone and mass-messaged his contacts while they were out having drinks, and he didn’t notice. If his phone is password protected, as almost all phones are, this is impossible and he is lying. My phone locks to password-protect even if I don’t touch the screen for a few seconds. It goes to lock even if I take a little too long reading an email without touching the screen.

So if a friend of the hospital CEO was able to pick up his phone and use it, it isn’t password protected. And we cannot be expected to believe that, or that he would leave his phone lying around unmonitored and without a password. The Times of Malta journalist should have pounced on this: “You’re the state general hospital CEO and not only isn’t your phone password-protected, but you leave it lying around unmonitored so that anybody can pick it up and read your work-related emails and messages? That would be a resignation matter or sacking offence if it were credible.”

Another technical issue that should have been examined in the report is that it isn’t possible to mass-message people in your contacts list unless you have a group already. So the ‘prankster friend’ would have had to find a ready-made group in Falzon’s contacts list to be able to mass-message them instantly. Did he have such a group, and if so, did the recipients all belong to it? He was bound to lie in response to that, but if he hesitated before answering, or sounded confused, that would have been a dead give-away.

I think Franco Mercieca’s former chief of staff and Konrad Mizzi’s consultant and appointee is definitely lying. And do you know what tells me, most of all, that he is lying – even without the context of his involvement with the corrupt Triad and his own involvement in Labour Party politics?

He doesn’t give any details, but just a generalised excuse. A person who wasn’t lying would have taken great care to cover all possible bases of enquiry even before the questions were asked, most pertinently the points I mentioned about the password and the contacts group.

I think Ivan Falzon sent those messages, knowingly and willingly, to raise funds for the political party on whose ticket he stood for election and for which he canvasses for votes. But he got caught out because he didn’t think it through, and like the minister who appointed him, he’s feeling immune.

Franco Mercieca with his vote-canvasser and former Labour Party councillor Ivan Falzon, who Konrad Mizzi handpicked for the specially-created and previously nonexistant post of Mater Dei Hospital CEO.