by Carlo Bonini
I am in a situation where people who can’t even read English and therefore, have never read anything I’ve written, at the same time are aware of who I am, know that they are meant to hate me, or dislike me, or despise me, or disagree with me, or whatever, and react to me on that basis. Totally irrespective of what I write but as the figure that they are told to hate. So, this has become a massive problem and I have had cases, especially when the incitement is really high at times of political tension, where I have had problems even with people in the street and I look at them and I think, ‘Okay, what’s their problem with me? I don’t think they’ve ever read anything I’ve written. They look like they can’t even talk, let alone read.’
There was one case which had ended up in the papers, when I was in the car park at the hospital. I had spent all day there with my mother and by the time I went down to the car park, it was practically empty. It was after visiting hours, and I was trying to reverse out of my parking bay and I see this big car behind me.
My face had just been up on all the Labour Party billboards all round the island where they put me up in the same group as the prime minister, senior politicians, and I was totally the fish out of water; but I was there with these politicians, so I became instantly recognisable.
Now there was this car blocking me. I mean it was a really intense situation. I reversed out and this guy started shouting and blowing the horn and he went to file a report saying that I reversed into him which wasn’t true at all. The police then did a conspiracy out of it because they happened to be supporters of the government. They took me to Court; it was headlines in all the papers. And when it came down to the crunch, the Magistrate said, ‘she had no marks on her car, the police themselves confirmed this; the dried mud on the car wasn’t disturbed and it’s quite obvious that you conspired with the police for this whole thing’. And she just let me off.
Maybe you don’t remember the newspaper environment in the 1990s when I started writing. There were just two English language newspapers: The Sunday Times and The Times. The others were owned by the political parties. And The Sunday Times and The Times in those days were very drab. They had foreign news on the front pages, nothing like the news we have today. And there were no columns with the person’s name, there was just one anonymous ‘Roamer’s Column’.
Two things happened: Malta got its first named newspaper columnist and it was a 25-year-old woman. And this thing was a double shock. And I used to have people actually telling me, ‘But does your husband write them for you? Does your father? Does your brother? Do you have a brother?’ Which is really offensive.
The gender dimension was horrific. Because women were not allowed to have opinions.
I have advertising on my website. It’s obvious I need the advertising since that’s where the money comes from. A lot of my ads are Google but I also have the ability to sell advertising. I actually encounter situations where people are afraid. They recognise that it’s their audience and it’s a fantastic audience for them but they are actually afraid to advertise on it because they think they would get retribution from the government. I’ve actually been told this.
I can’t even go to the beach! I can’t! For four years I have not been able to go to the beach. The last time I went was four years ago. There was this group following me around taking photos of me and uploading me on Facebook. I said, ‘Forget it, I’m not going to the beach anymore’.
I’ve been at it since I was 25 and experience hardens you and it just becomes your way of life. I know no other way of life. One of the wonders for me when leaving Malta, is knowing what normal life is like, because I can be invisible, I can go where I like, without people staring or nudging, or whatever. Because my whole life has been like … 25 is not much away from 18.
And so, I got used to it, like a scar forms around a wound. But, my biggest concern is that because people see what happened to me, they don’t want to do it. It’s scared others off. So, people keep asking, ‘Why is there only one of her?’ And the only reason, there’s one of her is not because I do something unique or wonderful or my abilities are super special.
I really hate to give up. That’s a personality trait. I’ve been doing it for a really long time. As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound now. What am I going to do? Give up now? Now I’m maybe a bit more secure but, can you imagine what happened to me earlier this year with Chris Cardona discovering that he can use that precautionary warrant for a libel suit that had never been done in Malta before? It was always legally possible, but it had never, ever been done before. Suppose that had happened to me when I was 25 or when I was 30. I wouldn’t have had the resources to cope.
2006. I go home one day about three days before the fire and found that somebody had painted in big black letters ‘Daphne sucks black cock’ all over the road. Huge letters over the road. And luckily by the time I got home and phoned the police, somebody had come out with a paintbrush and had painted over them.
I said, ‘Okay, they’re coming next with a fire.’ And they set fire to the house at about 3am. And, they didn’t set fire to the front door because our house is isolated. They actually went to the back and put truck tyres packed with jerry cans full of petrol against a glass door.
They wanted to burst in the glass doors and behind there were rugs and so it was to set the whole house on fire. And we were really lucky because our bedroom is down on the ground floor. The house is built on a slope and they came up through the back and five days before we had changed those doors to security doors so even though they were glass, it was fire-proof. They took quite a long time to shatter and when they shattered, the glass stayed in place. But they didn’t know because when they had come on the recce they found pine doors with normal glass which would have exploded. Also it was three o’clock in the morning when our son came home. He saw the fire reaching up to the roof and he started shouting.
It’s a very primitive situation and I really don’t feel I’m living in a European country. I can’t say I do, I really can’t. I used to have these arguments with people who used to tell me, ‘But the Labour Party is so much more liberal than the Nationalist Party. You know, gay rights and whatever.’ And I used to tell them, ‘The true test of how liberal a society is or a person is, is not divorce and gay rights, it’s their attitude, toleration of other people’s opinions …’ They have divorce in Russia. It doesn’t make it a liberal society. And what does it tell you if Malta has gay rights and gay marriage but then they literally decimate anybody with a different political opinion.
I’m quite sure women journalists are more harassed in more advanced societies than ours too. But, in Malta the form of harassment is really, really primitive. It’s always what you look like, how fat you are, how overweight you are, and I remember that one of the very first columns I had written in the early 90s, I said ‘I really can’t accept the way a man can go into battle with dandruff on his shoulders, shabby suit, ugly hair, and nobody even mentions the fact that he looks like an unmade bed or he’s really ugly or really messy, and why doesn’t he wash his hair? Nobody! Because a man has a right to look like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.’ And God forbid you mention it because men are meant to look like that but then if a woman is going to be less than perfect, she’s going to get trashed. And look at the efforts being made by the women in public life in Malta. I mean, look at them. I look at them and think, ‘Why do you feel you have to fall out of bed in the morning at 6 a.m. and put on two inches of makeup on your face? Look at the men around you. Some of them haven’t even washed their face.’
Intimidation is constant with me and it is absolutely terrible. And there have been periods where literally I would feel like, oh my God, I’m going to get a stomach ulcer; churning nerves all the time. Because you’re living under it constantly. And it was bad enough, when the Labour Party was in opposition but now they’re in government they have access to all my private information at the push of a button. The Nationalist Party in gover
nment also had access to that information. It also had journalists that it didn’t like. But I can’t imagine ever in a million years that anybody who was in government crossed the line and used any information about any journalist abusively or used it to threaten them or whatever. But it’s happening now.
They have absolutely no red lines. For them, any information they have access to is fair. There have absolutely no boundaries. They can call up anything about anybody, even your children’s exam results.
It’s a climate of fear. People are afraid of consequences. For example, even when people send me information, they say ‘Don’t quote me.’ And sometimes I feel like laughing. I say, ‘All you’ve done is sent me a photo from Facebook, I mean, keep you anonymous? It’s not like you’re giving me a state secret.’
If you’re writing an article talking about the banking sector and there are serious problems there, your article will be so much more powerful and more convincing if you could quote Mr X, chairman of X bank, not ‘sources in the banking industry’ and you know it’s the chairman, but he doesn’t want to be quoted. Your readers need to know it’s the chairman.
16 October 2017. Evening. A sizeable crowd gathers on the waterfront in Sliema, Daphne’s childhood town, carrying candles and flowers, stunned by the news of her cruel death. There is no plan, no speeches, no leaders. People just come together in shock and grief. At one point, someone starts singing the Maltese national anthem and others join in. Softly.
21 October 2017. The Maltese government offers a €1 million reward for information about Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, conditional on the family’s agreement. The family say the reward is for the government to decide and so the offer quietly sinks from public view.
22 October 2017. Some 15,000 people gather in Triq ir-Repubblika, Valletta in response to a call from civil society activists marching to demand the resignation of the police chief and the attorney general, and new appointments agreed by all parties, not just Labour.
Joseph Muscat and Adrian Delia are not present.
Across the street from the law courts, people leave flowers, candles, and protest messages at the foot of the Great Siege Memorial.
Over the next weeks and months, more marches will be held and the flowers, candles, and messages of protest replenished and refreshed. What starts as an impromptu memorial becomes a shrine to Daphne and a focal point for the calls for justice. This needles opponents into turning up in the dead of the night to try and stamp out the memorial but every day more protesters turn up to restore it.
23 October 2017. It’s been a week since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed. Hers is the first political assassination in Malta’s history that killed its target.
Parliament convenes. On the agenda is the 2018 budget. But opposition leader Adrian Delia requests an urgent discussion of the assassination. Government MPs deny this is an urgent matter. Parliament proceeds with its regular agenda.
Four days later around 100 women gather on the steps of the Auberge de Castille just outside the closed door of the prime minister’s office. They tell journalists they are protesting against the political class’ outrageous behaviour in trying to imply that it was business as usual when Malta’s democracy is under threat.
The protesting women said they intend to stay outside the prime minister’s office until they get an appointment to see him and give him a piece of their mind.
Daphne’s sons Matthew, Andrew, and Paul have pizza delivered to the protestors. One of the boxes is garnished with leaves from their mother’s bay tree, and a note of thanks. In Greek mythology, the nymph Daphne turns into a laurel tree to protect herself from being raped.
The prime ministers’s deputy press secretary is spotted taking photos of the protesters.
This evening a new protest movement in Malta is born. They brand themselves #occupyjustice and use the bay leaf as the symbol of their campaign.
14 November 2017. On the initiative of the President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani, the press room of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg is renamed Salle Daphne Caruana Galizia.
4 December 2017. Maltese authorities release spectacular footage of the arrest of 10 people suspected of involvement in the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
The next day, three of the 10, brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio and Vincent Muscat, are taken to court and formally charged with homicide. They plead not guilty.
21 February 2018. Ján Kuciak, a 28-year-old investigative journalist working for the Slovak online news site Aktuality.sk, and his girlfriend Martina Kušnírová are found dead at home. They have been shot multiple times. After Daphne, Kuciak becomes the second journalist to be killed in the European Union in as many years.
Tens of thousands of Slovak citizens take to the streets demanding justice.
Taking a leaf out of Joseph Muscat’s handbook, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico also offers a €1 million reward for information. Fico outdoes Muscat, however, and with a remarkable flair of showmanship, plonks €1 million in cash on a table. It makes for a great photo op.
Within two days, Slovakia’s Minister for Culture Marek Maďarič, a long-standing senior member of government, resigns. Marek Maďarič explains his decision: ‘Plainly said, as culture minister, I cannot put up with a journalist being murdered during my tenure.’
Meanwhile, two public service officiails also resign, pending the outcome of the investigation into the murder. They deny all involvement but acknowledge that they are named in the last report Kuciak wrote. They are national security council secretary Viliam Jasaň and Mária Trošková, an aide to Prime Minister Robert Fico.
12 March 2018. Slovakia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Robert Kalinak, resigns. He is responsible for the police force.
14 March 2018. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico loses the support of his coalition partners and resigns.
In Malta, activists are watching the story unfolding in Slovakia and cannot help comparing it unfavourably with the local scene. No one in Malta even offers to resign.
24 March 2018. The Maltese authorities refuse to grant former police inspector and former FIAU investigator Jonathan Ferris whistleblower status.
Jonathan Ferris was handpicked to join the FIAU by its director Manfred Galdes. He was reassigned from the police force, and lasted less than six months in the job before being fired summarily at the end of his probationary period. Galdes had just resigned. Ferris argues he should have been sent back to the police force if he was no longer needed at the FIAU, and sues for unfair dismissal.
Ferris says he became aware of ‘corruption at the highest level’ while at the FIAU but cannot say more because he can be imprisoned for breaching confidentiality. He is publicly reminded of this by government spokespeople including Labour MP Manuel Mallia, formerly a minister responsible for the police.
Ferris is also the police officer who arrested Maria Efimova for allegedly defrauding Pilatus Bank of less than €2,000 that had been alleged by her employer Pilatus Bank, and who was briefly investigated after she complained of police mistreatment.
In an interview with co-author Manuel Delia, Ferris says internal police investigators appeared keen to use Efimova’s complaint to discredit her as a witness in other cases. Ferris says he was encouraged to embellish his testimony to achieve this aim but he refused to cooperate and stuck to his recollection of the facts.
Under Maltese legislation, an applicant for whistleblower status must first tell a government official from the office of the prime minister the gist of their complaint so that the government can assess whether the information they want to reveal meets the criteria established by law. In Ferris’s case, this puts him in an awkward position. To be granted whistleblower status, he first needs to risk imprisonment and reveal official secrets, before he is granted the protection he needs to be able to reveal what he knows. If Joseph Heller had only lived long enough, he would have had enough material to write a sequel to Catch-22.
A mont
h earlier, Ferris tells co-author John Sweeney that he fears for his life and wants full police protection in view of what he knows. While at the FIAU, Ferris worked on the investigation following on from the allegations made against Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri in the Panama Papers.
‘We believe there was political interference (in my dismissal from the FIAU),’ he tells the BBC’s Newsnight programme. The FIAU denies this. The anti-money laundering agency claims Ferris’s dismissal was based ‘solely on an objective and comprehensive performance assessment’.
22 July 2018. The attorney general publishes a short extract, 49 pages, of a 1,500-page report prepared by Magistrate Aaron Bugeja, tasked with conducting a magisterial inquiry into the Egrant scandal. It has taken him 15 months. It has been nine months since Daphne was murdered.
The attorney general refuses to publish the report. The only people to see the full report are the prime minister (the subject of the inquiry) and Justice Minister Owen Bonnici. The prime minister says he shared the report with his lawyer Pawlu Lia and press secretary Kurt Farrugia.
The prime minister says it is not for him to publish the full report but for the attorney general.
The inquiry finds no evidence linking the Muscats to Egrant Inc.
Magistrate Aaron Bugeja finds no documentation linking the Muscat family to the allegations.
A UK-based forensic accounting firm, Harbinson Forensics, finds no evidence linking the Muscats to Egrant on Pilatus Bank servers. It finds no evidence that any of the Muscats had accounts at Pilatus Bank. It finds no evidence in the Pilatus Bank records of any bank accounts, or discussion about opening bank accounts for Egrant, Schembri’s Tillgate, or Mizzi’s Hearnville.