Disgraced former Attorney General Peter Grech hired as justice minister’s consultant

Tista’ taqra l-artiklu bil-Malti hawn.

Peter Grech, the former Attorney General implicated in a raft of scandals involving Labour’s Muscat administration, was put back on the government’s payroll soon after his resignation and is now serving as a consultant to the justice minister.

According to information published in the Government Gazette, less than three months after his resignation as AG, in September 2020, Grech was hired to fill a lucrative government consultancy role. He’s being paid €62,000 a year for the job, funded by taxpayers. 

It is not yet known whether Grech is also concurrently receiving a government pension.

Peter Grech, who was appointed Attorney General in 2010, came under harsh criticism for his actions during all the major scandals that rocked the Labour government, and was accused by the Opposition and NGO’s of ensuring that investigations into the long list of alleged wrong-doing involving the highest echelons of the government did not move forward.

One of the most egregious examples of his inaction in the face of blatant criminality concerned the revelations of the Panama Papers in 2016, which directly exposed secret bank accounts involving the then Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Keith Schembri and sitting Minister Konrad Mizzi. 

In that incident, Peter Grech told the police to go-slow on any sort of investigation to expose the truth and also advised them not to seize Nexia BT’s servers, the accounting firm that actually set up the secret bank accounts for Labour politicians.

In direct contravention of his duty and responsibility as Attorney General, Grech had told the police commissioner that such action (seizure) would be “intrusive” and “drastic”.

Following the notorious Egrant inquiry, which investigated the connections between disgraced former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, his wife Michelle and the Panama Papers, including the Pilatus Bank, Grech was found guilty by the court of breaching the human rights of the then Opposition leader Adrian Delia, by not giving him access to the inquiry. At the same time, Grech had sent a copy of the inquiry to the government soon after he received a call from then Justice Minster Owen Bonnici.

Grech had also warned against the leaking of FIAU investigations that exposed money laundering activities by senior government officials and the top management of Allied Newspapers, while he was chairing the FIAU.

During his last years as AG, amid emerging regular scandals and potential crimes, Grech resisted many calls for his immediate resignation, including public protests outside his office.