Cardona silent on dropping of Caruana Galizia lawsuit, request for mobile phone records

Minister Chris Cardona’s staff has once again completely ignored an offer by this newspaper to review the Minister’s mobile phone records from the time he was accused of having visited a brothel in Germany.

The libel case filed by Economy Minister Chris Cardona against Caruana Galizia over the infamous FKK Acapulco claims was unexpectedly cancelled three months back, and the Minister had until Friday of last week to reinstitute the case.

He did not do so and as such, the case has now been cancelled.

This week, as this newspaper had done back in June, an offer by this newspaper to review the mobile phone TAP data of Cardona, which would conclusively prove the minister’s whereabouts on the day he was accused by assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia of having visited a brothel in Germany, has been ignored.

Cardona, for one reason or another, appears happy to have let the case go.

In June, the two libel cases filed by Cardona against Caruana Galizia over the infamous FKK Acapulco claims were unexpectedly cancelled. The cases filed by the Minister’s aide, Joe Gerada, still stand.

In an announcement through the Department of Information at the time, the government claimed that a strange and unconfirmed SMS presented in court as evidence “proves” that Caruana Galizia did not know the identity of the source. It also said that the evidence showed that the SMSs sent to the assassinated journal- ist originated from Malta, and not from Germany.

Apparently shooting from the hip and pre-empting the court’s analysis of the evidence produced, the government said: “These included text messages sent between the number used by Daphne Caruana Galizia and an anonymous source. The texts clearly indicate that Caruana Galizia did not know the identity of the source and never sought to verify the identity and the content of these messages. Additionally, in the application presented today, it is also stated that the messages from this source were sent from Malta and not from Germany.

“The information relayed in these messages was then used as the basis of Caruana Galizia’s published stories in which defamatory allegations were made against Minister Cardona and Dr Gerada. In the light of this new evidence, the application filed today includes a request to the court to preserve call logs and SMS messages in relation to the communications made between the defendant and the source over the relevant period in relation to the stories published by Daphne Caruana Galizia.”

The veracity of that SMS, however, has been torn to shreds since it was presented in court last June.

The main problem with the SMS, which was published by the Labour Party media, was that it was dated 31 January, while Caruana Galizia’s story on the Minister’s alleged brothel tryst, based on that same source’s real-time eyewitness ac- count, was reported a day earlier, on 30 January.

Apart from the relative ease with which one can doctor a screen image or a mobile phone’s contacts to make it look as though a message had been received by anyone under the sun (for example change a contact’s name to ‘Barack Obama’ and every text you receive from that contact will appear to have come from the former US president), this rudimentary problem with the date appears overwhelmingly suspicious.

Caruana Galizia reportedly had two sources for the story. The first allegedly reported to her over the phone Cardona’s movements in real-time, while the second source had contacted Caruana Galizia the next day to inform her that Cardona had returned to the brothel the next day for a short time.

With so many question marks still lin- gering over the whole affair, it is unfortunate that the Minister appears reluctant to take up the offer to clear his name.