Steve Ellul blames young official for publicly funded Ira Losco publicity

A 26-year-old Labour activist put on Project Green’s payroll soon after graduating from University has taken the bullet for the abusive use of public funds to publicise then CEO and Labour MEP candidate Steve Ellul and Minister Miriam Dalli.

Project Green’s Head of Communications Pamela Cann Rodgers, from Birżebbuġa, Miriam Dalli’s electoral district, told Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi that she had proposed starting to pay popular singer Ira Losco to publicise Project Green.

She insisted that it was also her idea to instruct Losco to start including Minister Dalli and Steve Ellul in the publicity, but she said that no one ordered her.

Pressed by the Commissioner as to whether anyone gave her directions on how to deal with Losco, she said that her boss, CEO Steve Ellul, was aware and gave his go-ahead. Cann Rodgers insisted that she has never discussed this publicity with Minister Dalli.

Cann Rodgers gave her declarations following a probe started by the Standards Commissioner following a story published by The Shift in which it was revealed that Ira Losco, one of the island’s most popular singers, was being paid almost €500 from public funds for every social media post marketing Project Green.

Independent candidate Arnold Cassola asked the Commissioner for a probe, which concluded that the tagging was “ethically dubious”.

The Commissioner concluded that Minister Dalli was unaware and that Steve Ellul could not be sanctioned as he was not considered to be a public officer.

Correspondence published by the Office of the Standards Commissioner shows that Cann Rodgers instructed Ira Losco directly to ensure that Minister Dalli and Steve Ellul were included in the publicly financed publicity. Losco immediately obliged.

When The Shift asked Losco whether it was ethical for her to publicise political figures through public funds, she said that she was not aware that she was doing anything wrong. However, she immediately stopped doing so after The Shift’s reports.

In an email to the minister following the incident, Steve Ellul told the minister that this was “an oversight”.

Ellul was appointed CEO of Project Green to increase his media presence ahead of his MEP candidature.

Despite using tens of thousands in publicity stunts, including through publicly-funded Project Green initiatives, he failed to make it to Brussels. He was ousted by Thomas Bajada, a young Gozitan who decided to contest only two months before the elections.

Following Ellul’s failure to get elected, Prime Minister Robert Abela appointed Steve Ellul to head another agency – Infrastructure Malta – after Transport Minister Chris Bonett fired CEO Ivan Falzon.

Cann Rodgers stopped working at Project Green last February when Miriam Dalli appointed former disgraced MFSA CEO Joseph Cuschieri to replace Ellul.