by Carlo Bonini
Her home in the Bidnija countryside is surrounded by a beautiful and deceptively chaotic garden. After her death, her sons Matthew, Andrew, and Paul spoke of how much their mother loved their garden, refuting conventional notions of pattern and alignment and seeking to regain an untamed wilderness sheltered from the oppressive ordinariness of the agricultural landscape outside her gate.
In a speech to the European Parliament a month after she was killed, Peter Caruana Galizia said of his wife: ‘The more frustrated Daphne grew at the state of our country, the more beautiful our garden became.’
Speaking to co-author Manuel Delia, Peter spoke of how he could claim no credit for the attractive, sometimes quirky, decor of their beautiful home. Daphne collected figurines of elephants made of porcelain, wood, or glass; of shapes and colours that shuffled together left one with the idea of the Platonic elephant, an archetype of memory, patience, strength, constancy, courage, and a maternal instinct that is playful and teasing but fierce when needed.
By the time she had finished preparing the July 2017 edition of Taste & Flair, the political scene in Malta had spun beyond all recognition. With a heavy heart, she knew she had to get back to her laptop and continue her Running Commentary.
As soon as the election result was announced, Simon Busuttil tendered his resignation and kickstarted a process to elect his replacement by Independence Day on 21 September.
There was no obvious successor to Simon Busuttil, unlike previous transfers of power.
In the context of recrimination and desperate disappointment, in the painful soul-searching, and in the absence of any obvious candidate to take on the top job, a man walked in from outside and said he would give the PN a ‘new way’ to winning days.
His name was Adrian Delia (no relation to the co-author Manuel Delia) and ‘the last time he did anything for the Nationalist Party, he was 17’, Daphne said in a post published on 29 June 2017. That would have been 30 years earlier.
The new candidate presented himself as a political fighter in contrast with Simon Busuttil who, he said, was not.
On that latter point, Daphne did not disagree. On 30 June she wrote:
Now that all is done and dusted, I can say that the single factor that most contributed to Simon Busuttil’s electoral undoing is that he does not have that essential fighting spirit, the sort that says inside you: ‘Come and get me, you f**king bastards, and watch me flatten you into the pavement.’
I got the impression that he would never even think words like ‘f**king’ and ‘bastards’, or their equivalent in Maltese, and that he would bridle and be genuinely upset if anybody so much as used them in his presence.
In ordinary life, this is a huge advantage, because the way we get along in ordinary life is by cooperating with others and not fighting them, not thinking of them as bastards and not being aggressive towards them. But politics is not ordinary life. It is as far from ordinary as it is possible to get without actually living with the Kardashians.
When the Nationalist Party’s television station broadcast footage of Joseph Muscat emerging from a television debate and saying about Dr Busuttil, ‘Imur jieħdu f’sormu’ (which means literally ‘he can take it up the arse’, the technical way of saying ‘he can bugger off’), it did so thinking people would be scandalised.
I thought that was a mistake. Nationalist supporters of the sort who don’t like that kind of language and attitude would have been upset, but they would have been voting Nationalist anyway. Labour supporters wouldn’t be changing their vote on that basis alone, but a whole bunch of people would have thought, ‘That’s the right attitude’ and many of them would have been Nationalist supporters.
Adrian Delia quickly earned a reputation for being perfectly willing to use unparliamentary language in conversation, in contrast with his predecessors. But that didn’t mean he had the fighting spirit so necessary to a party leader:
We should have noticed already that Adrian Delia, who is being promoted hard and fast as the Nationalist Party’s Moses (except that he has no intention of spending 40 years in the desert and has only popped in now because he is prepared to give it five years in Opposition max) has no fighting spirit to speak of. Anybody with any kind of fighting spirit would have been out there fighting the Labour Party long ago, but Dr Delia hasn’t so much as written a Facebook comment or newspaper article.
Even in the two interviews he gave he had absolutely nothing to say about the government or the Labour Party, totally oblivious to the fact that he is going to be elected for no purpose other than to fight them.
In that last sentence, Daphne Caruana Galizia showed she had immediately perceived what Adrian Delia’s core strategic approach to his leadership of the PN would be. The demons he would confront would be within the party he would lead, not outside it. He would seek to overthrow the party’s ethical attitude to governance. He would seek to overturn ‘djuq’, best translated as ‘holier than thou’. He would seek to remould the PN in the image of the PL.
Adrian Delia spoke fluently and moved confidently on the stage. By training he was a court litigator and was adept at putting on a show. Party activists, who felt the previous leadership was staid, rallied to him. As did people who found all the talk about good governance too cerebral or too far from the minds of ordinary voters.
Party activists are propagandists in the street where they live. For decades they faced the ire of their neighbours, who were wont to claim their support of the PN was not getting them anywhere, if they had been denied a public sector job or a building permit. Life was much easier for their PL counterparts, armed with the currency of favours and gifts from above. Adrian Delia looked like he understood how the Maltese voter’s mind worked.
Daphne Caruana Galizia went about profiling this man who had come in from the cold.
She found that for several years Adrian Delia had represented a Soho landlord whose apartments had been raided by the British police for prostitution and people trafficking. She also found that his clients were able to clear daily cash deposits from ‘rent’ paid by the prostitutes using an account in Adrian Delia’s name in Jersey.
She challenged Adrian Delia to declare whether he had bank accounts in offshore jurisdictions, which he categorically denied. She then proceeded to publish a screenshot of a bank statement from HSBC Jersey bearing his name. His reaction was that he was no longer sure if he had a bank account in Jersey and that when he called the Jersey branch they told him their records did not go that far back.
The flimsy responses did not dent his support. On the contrary, pressure from Daphne Caruana Galizia became a political asset for Adrian Delia as he campaigned for the leadership post in the summer of 2017 ahead of the leadership election in September.
When Joseph Muscat called the June 2017 election a year earlier than it was due, he blamed Daphne and claimed her ‘lies’ had destabilised his government and he wanted voters to decide whether he was guilty or not. It was a kangaroo court presided over by the accused and at the end of the five-week campaigning process the prosecutor, Daphne, was condemned to ignominy.
PN supporters who had hailed her a heroine and had marched in her support, now accused her of being the reason behind the PN’s losing streak, damning her as a curse.
The change in attitude had a foundation with a long pedigree. The PL often challenged previous PN leaders ‘to condemn Daphne’ or somehow disassociate themselves from her.
But PN leaders before Adrian Delia did not think it was a good idea to condemn independent journalists or even ‘to disassociate themselves’. For one thing, disassociation implies previous association, which was an absurd notion. Daphne was not beholden to the PN. But more importantly, politicians with some integrity do not thunder against journalists from their seats in parliament. They understand the importance of public scrutiny. At least that was the accepted behaviour in a world of political restraint before populism, before Donald Trump.
In the Maltese context, the Trumpian assaul
t on independent journalism, was now being defined by Adrian Delia and cheered on by an enthusiastic audience grateful for a neat solution to all the problems of the PN: the exorcism of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Egging on that support was an unlikely ally: the PL media that supported Adrian Delia’s nomination. Leading the counter-intelligence operation was Robert Musumeci, he of the #downwithgalizia online campaign and partner of her nemesis, Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera.
Robert Musumeci argued that the PN should vote in a way that would rid it of the devil that had been possessing it, Daphne Caruana Galizia. It later turned out that Adrian Delia and Robert Musumeci were buddies. Friends in high places.
Daphne was not letting up. That summer she published stories about Adrian Delia’s abyss of personal debts, about former clients of his who believe he had shafted them in deals where he was supposed to be representing them but turned out he was representing himself, and of his vulnerability to banks and creditors who liked nothing better than having a politician beholden to them.
Adrian Delia’s campaign for leadership made Daphne Caruana Galizia its chief antagonist, perhaps sharing pride of place with Simon Busuttil who, in any case, had already resigned the party leadership. The PL narrative – that Daphne Caruana Galizia presided over a coven of puppets in the PN whom she controlled and inevitably drove to destruction at the hands of popular justice – was adopted wholesale by Adrian Delia.
In one dramatic speech at a campaign event, Adrian Delia gave an unhinged performance that has remained imprinted in people’s memory as a turning point. This was when lines were drawn within the PN and support for the soon-to-be PN leader and respect for Daphne Caruana Galizia would become entirely irreconcilable.
Delia shrilly described Daphne Caruana Galizia as a ‘biċċa blogger’ (a two-bit blogger) and the PN needed to be rid of her. The choice of the description was not accidental.
In a previous lawsuit, Pawlu Lia, a lawyer for the PL had argued that a post written by a blogger did not amount to journalism and its author was not entitled to the protections afforded to journalists. The defendant in that case was Daphne Caruana Galizia.
The term ‘blogger’ was thrown in the same cauldron of deceit and witchcraft that Daphne Caruana Galizia had brewed in the service of the PN and was now using against the promised leader. He would cleanse the party of her, he claimed.
He accompanied his aggressive response with action. Over the next six days, he filed five libel suits against Daphne, exposing her to a liability of €55,000 and presumably hoping that at some point she would give up.
She did not. Daphne Caruana Galizia did not let lawsuits slow her down. At one point, Silvio Debono, a hotelier and PL funder, filed 19 libel suits against Daphne over a single article she had written criticising the government for granting him a prime site of public land on which to build luxury apartments. That was a libel suit for each sentence he found problematic. At the time of writing all 19 cases – a maximum liability of €210,000 (excluding court and legal expenses) which Daphne’s husband and children have inherited – are still ongoing and, significantly, under Adrian Delia’s leadership, the PN is a habitual user of Silvio Debono’s venues for its social events.
That heat and confrontation attracts the wrong sort of people to politics. Adrian Delia surrounded himself with a small vigilante crew of thugs, some of whom were known to police for association with street crime.
Daphne identified some of those people, and connected the support Adrian Delia was enjoying with thugs often seen in the company of the Labour government’s Economy Minister Chris Cardona.
That connection proved to be more than a mere coincidence. The Soho brothel business connected Chris Cardona (PL) to Adrian Delia (PN).
The brothel was at 52, Greek Street, London W1. It was registered in the name of a Bahamas company called Healey Properties Limited in order to create a further degree of separation between the prostitution and human trafficking rackets and the landlords who cashed the proceeds from the activity.
Up to December 2003, Cardona and Delia were both practising lawyers and directors of Healey Properties. They resigned their directorships in a letter signed only by Adrian Delia on behalf of both of them.
When that detail became public, the PN old guard felt vindicated in their suspicion that Adrian Delia’s election to the PN leadership served the PL’s interests better than those of the Nationalist Party that Adrian Delia was seeking to lead.
Consistent polling and election results since September 2017 showed that an element of traditional core support was now withholding its backing from the PN. And no new inroads were being made among people who had voted PL. The PN was further from an electoral victory than it had been since the Second World War.
On the eve of the leadership election, the PN ethics committee reported that Adrian Delia had failed to answer questions about his past dodgy dealings, particularly in connection with the laundering of proceeds from prostitution. Reacting to that report, Simon Busuttil’s final act as party leader was to publicly call for Adrian Delia to withdraw his candidature. He did not.
On 17 September 2017, Adrian Delia assumed office as leader of the PN. A loyal MP would resign his seat in Parliament a few days later to allow for the co-option of Adrian Delia so that he could assume office as leader of the opposition.
Writing on the day of his election, Daphne Caruana Galizia said ‘overnight, that 36,000-vote gap between the parties has shot to at least 60,000’. The figure was not the product of a poll but her estimation of the portion of the PN that voted for the party not out of tribal loyalty but simply because it had been more decent than the PL.
On 10 October, she headlined a post: ‘I wasn’t far wrong when I wrote on 17th September that the 36,000-vote gap had shot up to 60,000’.
I had no surveys to work off but only years of experience in writing about Maltese political behaviour and an obvious understanding of how a big chunk of the Nationalist Party’s core support thinks. My own views are not at all unusual, as those who would undermine me seek to make out. They are actually pretty typical of a great, big, key category of electors and that’s exactly why I have the readership I do: I understand my audience and the fact that I am one of them.
I had spent the past few weeks writing about how the Nationalist Party would be scripting its suicide note by making Delia its leader, not only because he himself is a knave but, crucially, because when the party allows itself to be hijacked by anybody walking in from the outside, it looks weak, vulnerable, and structurally disorganised. And that means people won’t feel safe trusting it to run the country.
Two days ago, Malta Today published a survey that shows how the vote-gap between the two political parties has actually doubled, from 36,000 to 73,000. My instinctive understanding on the day of Delia’s election that the gap had shot to 60,000 had been correct – probably because it was not ‘instinct’ at all but a real understanding of how the people for whom I write actually think, for no other reason than that I am like they are.
Six days later Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated. News of her killing was on the radio around 3.30pm that Monday afternoon. Adrian Delia was being driven home from the office. When the news came out, he told his driver to take him back to PN headquarters and called a friend, a medical doctor, to meet him there.
When he arrived and walked into the lobby of the building, he said he was feeling unwell and swooned on the nearest couch.
He had been party leader for a month and the ‘biċċa blogger’ that dominated his electoral campaign had just been killed. He must have realised that the rest of his term would be overshadowed by her murder.
THE MAFIA DENIES ANY WRONGDOING
One year after Malta’s then Nationalist government launched the first online gambling legislation in the European Union in 2004, the Casalesi clan of the ‘Gomorra’, the organised crime syndicate in the southern Italian region of Campania, decided to invest their capital on the island.
At around that time, the Italian police tapped a call between Nino Rotolo, a Palermo Mafia boss, and Antonino Cinà, a Corleone doctor and ‘man of honour’ or made man. Cinà had looked after Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, the Capi di tutti i Capi, the bosses of all bosses, of the Cosa Nostra, that is the Sicilian Mafia, during their decades on the run from the law.
‘Nino,’ Rotolo said. ‘You see that people are fasting, but they have to play.’ That Mafioso circumlocution meant that dirty money needed laundering and a way to do so needed to be found. The fast would be broken by cleaning up dirty money through online betting. Rotolo spoke about where the bets would be laid: Malta, that strip of land close to Italy was the obvious candidate for a Mafia safe haven.
Fifteen years later, Rotolo’s prescience proved correct and his vision was fully realised. The island hosts 300 virtual casinos and boasts the highest concentration in Europe of gambling operators domiciled in a single country. Gambling generates revenues of €1.2 billion a year and contributes 12% of Malta’s GDP.
Italian criminal organizations – all of them, without exception – hopped aboard that train, making Malta their main money laundering hub in the heart of the Mediterranean. The Italian parliament’s Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate reported every six months since 2015 its estimate that hundreds of millions of euro had been washed of blood and mud in the Malta laundromat.
It works like this. Anyone obtaining a licence in Malta for online gambling can operate throughout the European Union, provided they can show where the money is coming from and how the winnings and losses flow.
Gamblers must register by creating their own profile on the betting site and provide credit card details to pay for bets and collect winnings. If you always know who’s playing, the game is clean.