Updated 12.45pm, adds Graffitti statement
National Book Chairman Mark Camilleri has apologised for his foul language on social media and has had his calls to resign removed after a conversation with the education minister, he said.
Camilleri had resisted the ministry s request for him to resign over a row with Juliette Galea, a lawyer for the businessman accused of conspiring to murder journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Galea had messaged him a link to an article about Yorgen Fenech s request for the public inquiry into the murder to be shut down. After a brief exchange in which she described him as stupid , he told her to kiss my glorious brown, Marxist ass.
Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in. Keith Schembri resigned as Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff in late 2016 – he told the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry on Monday – but then the hijack occurred and Schembri was pulled back in since, apparently, he speaks Arabic.
Presumably, Martin Zammit, Malta’s leading expert on Arabic dialects, and the government’s other indispensable Arabic speaker, Neville Gafà, were unavailable.
It took Schembri another three years before he resigned. Who knew a hijack could take so long to tidy up?
Schembri presented himself as more sinned against than sinning. “Perhaps I took shortcuts but was I wrong? The country benefitted.”
Former OPM official Neville Gafà has been cleared of threatening Avvenire journalist Nello Scavo on social media last summer, with a court declaring that the facts were “not at all convincing”.
Criminal proceedings against Gafà stemmed from a tweeted exchange on June 27 in a reaction to an initial message by NGO Alarm Phone announcing that 95 migrants at sea had been intercepted by “Europe’s Libyan allies,” and “returned to a war zone”.
That message had prompted Gafà to comment, “You better stop your dirty business…”
Scavo, a vocal critic of Malta’s handling of the migration crisis, had tweeted back, “dirty business, dirty oil, dirty agreement by governments. Anything to say about this dirty ways”?
Neville Gafa acquitted of threatening Italian journalist in migration tweet
A court has liberated former OPM official Neville Gafa over charges that he threatened Italian journalist Nello Scavo
15 December 2020, 10:39am
by Kurt Sansone
Updated at 5:20pm with statement by European Centre for Press and Media Freedom
A Maltese court has acquitted former OPM official Neville Gafa of accusations that he threatened Italian journalist Nello Scavo in a twitter exchange last summer.
Magistrate Charmaine Galea said she was unconvinced by Scavo’s claim that he felt threatened by the tweet: ‘Stop your dirty business. If not we will be stopping you.’
Italpress
15 Dicembre 2020
LA VALLETTA (MALTA) (ITALPRESS/MNA) – Neville Gafà, a former official at the Office of the Maltese Prime Minister has been acquitted of threatening Italian journalist Nello Scavo last summer. The Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence and that the comment was more political than a threat.
The case goes back to a Tweet made in June 2020 by Neville Gafa telling Scavo “Stop your dirty business. If not, we will stop you.” The comment was made on a post by the humanitarian NGO Alarm Phone. The journalist who works with the Italian newspaper ‘L’Avvenirè had asked on Twitter to who was the threat meant, and who the “we” was referring to in Gafà’s tweet.