He would say that, wouldn’t he?
The Minister for the Economy, Chris Cardona, and his consultant and ‘EU presidency policy officer’, Joe Gerada, have both said that they will sue me for my reports of their extra-curricular activities in Velbert, Germany. They would say that, wouldn’t the
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com Their only other option is to resign from their posts and head off into obscurity. For Gerada that might not be such a big deal – after all, he is a mere policy officer and consultant, though no doubt he finds the whiff of power terribly thrilling. But for Cardona himself, resignation would be an enormous deal: he is both a cabinet minister and the Labour Party’s deputy leader.
Saying that you are going to sue somebody is the easy bit. It’s a cheap and quick way to deal with the immediate problem and get the media headlines you need to try to counter the fall-out of bad breaking news. There is no bar to suing in Malta: the fees are low, there is no primary vetting session which has cases thrown out if they are seen to be ridiculous (which is how I got to spend eight years in court when Toni Abela, now a judge, sued me for calling him a clown). And by the time the case drags through several years in court and reaches an outcome of whatever nature, nobody remembers the original bother anyway, and that outcome is irrelevant to the fuss that started it. But hey, the politician got the headlines he needed in his moment of crisis, and that’s what matters to him.
What can Chris Cardona and Joe Gerada do now but sue me, or just say that they will? They know I’m telling the truth, but admitting that would have to mean instant resignation and, in Cardona’s case, loss of authority in the party and wholesale decimation of his voter-base. Or perhaps not, given that Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri are still exactly where they were, and they did and are doing far worse than Chris Cardona.
You will notice that neither the Minister nor his consultant has issued a specific denial, but only a very generalised one. And this when my reports were extremely specific and not at all general and obscure. In fact, I reported what my source told me in detail.
The correct way of responding to such detailed accusations is with a similarly detailed rebuttal or explanation. Had the Minister and his consultant not done any of what I described, they would have said: “I did not go to the FKK Acapulco or to any other brothel or similar establishment, in Velbert or elsewhere, on Monday night or at any other time, and I did not return on Tuesday afternoon or at any other time.”
Instead, the Minister for the Economy released a statement through his government office, saying that he “categorically denies allegations published in the blog of Daphne Caruana Galizia on his whereabouts during an official Government visit in Germany, in what is a prime example of fake news.”
The statement continues: “This outright lie is another attempt on Caruana Galizia’s part to discredit and sully an individual’s reputation. This has not been the first incident where Minister Cardona has been the target of this blogger’s writing. However, as he has done previously, the Minister will continue to fulfil his role in attracting investment, strengthening the current economic climate, and creating more job opportunities.”
Let’s leave aside the terrible grammar and Maltese-English. This is one of the vaguest statements of denial that I have ever read. And of course, Chris Cardona would say that – because he was there. My source is not somebody random who rang me up out of the blue, some reader who decided to send me an anonymous message. It’s somebody extremely reliable, who was right there in the Velbert brothel. Identifying the other man was relatively straightforward. The Minister was in Germany with Joe Gerada from his ministry, so I got hold of several photographs of Gerada and ran them past my source, who recognised him as the man with Cardona in Velbert.
The interesting thing is that in the midst of all Cardona’s bluff and bluster and threats, not even his colleagues, government supporters and members of the Labour Party believe him. His reputation, unfortunately, precedes him. Instead of rushing online to say that I pulled the story out of my hat and invented the whole thing, the usual party and government trolls are starting off from the premise that he really did all that, and are trying to justify the minister’s behaviour when this isn’t at all what the story is about. It’s about a cabinet minister comporting himself in such a way when he’s an official guest of the German government, and worse still, taking an employee in his Ministry’s secretariat with him.
Fascinatingly, not even Glenn Bedingfield, the Prime Minister’s communications aide and chief government internet troll, has tried to stick up for Cardona, defend his honour, say that I lied about him and claim that of course the Minister for the Economy would never have gone to a brothel. They know him, you see, and they fear that my story is correct, in which they are right.