Just a worthless opinion

To the great delight of Prime Minister Robert Abela and Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri, a magistrate dismissed requests for magisterial inquiries into alleged corruption and money laundering by Camilleri.

One request revolved around a single road that cost €10.5 million more than initially planned, out of which €720,000 went to Camilleri’s former colleague at an architecture firm.

Another request focused on the suspicious inflation of the costs of a swimming pool from €9.1 million to over €18 million and counting.

But what was truly shocking wasn’t Magistrate Brigitte Sultana’s accession to the prime minister’s demands to dismiss the requests – it was her excuse for rejecting them.

The magistrate ruled that the media reports documenting the squandering of millions of taxpayers’ euro didn’t amount to evidence.

The magistrate decided that those media reports were “the opinion of the journalists” and counted for nothing, which is disturbing.

The magistrate’s ruling is a slap in the face of the Fourth Estate. But it also reflects the Gozo judiciary’s level of detachment from contemporary understanding of the role of investigative journalism.

For decades, investigative journalists’ work has led to investigations and prosecutions by law enforcement agencies worldwide. In 1972, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post journalists, exposed the Watergate scandal.

Their reporting led to the indictments of 40 administration officials and President Nixon’s resignation. Nobody in the US Justice Department dismissed Woodward’s and Bernstein’s reports as “the opinion of journalists.”

More recently, the Panama Papers, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, led to the investigation of Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a presidential candidate in Peru, for money laundering. In the US,  prosecutors secured several guilty pleas over tax fraud based on the Panama Papers.

The US Congress passed two landmark pieces of legislation—the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act and the For the People Act—based on the Panama Papers. In Malta, Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and minister Konrad Mizzi face prosecution after the Panama Papers revealed their secret financial structures.

Everything we know about Labour’s corruption and abuse is thanks to the work of investigative journalists. The indictment of public officials and their friends – from Joseph Muscat to Keith Schembri, from Ray Aquilina to Adrian Hillman, from Konrad Mizzi to Yorgen Fenech – only happened because of “the opinion of journalists”.

We would never have discovered who owned  17 Black without “the opinion of journalists”.  We’d never have known about Pilatus Bank and its money laundering, or Nexia BT and Brian Tonna, Karl Cini or Adrian Hillman.

Nobody would know that the owner of MacBridge was the mother-in-law of Cheng Chen, the man who negotiated the €320 million takeover of Enemalta, or that Yorgen Fenech was involved in the purchase of a wind farm in Montenegro.

Without “the opinion of journalists”, we’d still be under the illusion that Electrogas was a clean energy project that brought our utility bills down. Without “the opinion of journalists”, we’d never have known that Joseph Muscat was due to pocket €540,000 from a company paid by Steward Health Care.

What the Gozo court considers “the opinion of journalists”, the European Parliament treats as “the vital role that a free media fulfils in society”.

A report entitled ‘The Role of Investigative Journalism to Uncover Fraud and Corruption in Europe” maintains that the role of investigative journalists is to discover fraudulent and corrupt activities hidden from view.

“They, therefore, play a watchdog role in society by calling out such illicit activities and bringing them to the attention of law enforcement and regulatory authorities,” it states.  But in Malta, a magistrate dismissed journalists’ work as simply their “opinion” while the police and the Attorney General ignored it.

That document outlines examples of how investigative journalism was central to the detection of fraud and corruption.

The RISE project in Romania led to investigations by law enforcement over massive fraud targeting procurement in EU-funded programmes. The owner of Dutchmed, the company that supplied medical equipment to Romania during the pandemic, is accused of bribing health ministry employees based on journalists’ reporting.

The OECD published its own document, ‘The Role of the Media and Investigative Journalism in Combating Corruption’, which highlighted journalists’ “crucial role in bringing allegations of corruption to light and fighting against impunity”.

The OECD noted that cooperation between journalists “leads to tangible results in bringing financial and economic crime to the attention of law enforcement authorities” and that “media reporting is an essential source of detection in corruption cases”.

“The Fourth Estate should be respected as a free eye investigating misconduct,” the OECD insisted.  It added, “Protection of sources… is also fundamental to ensuring that corruption cases can be brought to light in the media”.

Bizarrely, the Gozo court complained that “the applicant had not filed any authorisation by his informers for their names to be disclosed for further investigation”.  Rather than protecting the sources, the magistrate wanted their names “for further investigation”.

The magistrate’s decision is a depressing reminder of the medieval stage on which our country operates. The court’s ruling is not just an insult to all journalists who put themselves at risk to expose the truth but also a fatal blow to the last glimmer of hope that justice could be done.

The magistrate has discredited every independent media house with the stroke of a pen, reducing their brave work to an entirely worthless exercise. To think that one of them sacrificed her life, only for her work to be disparaged and rubbished by the court as simply an inadmissible opinion.