Saviour Balzan: email source totally unconnected to political parties

MaltaToday's managing editor Saviour Balzan faced Transport Minister Austin Gatt during a press conference at the Nationalist Party headquarters, in which he categorically dispelled claims that the sources of emails showing that an oil trader held meetings with the then energy minister in 2004, were connected to a political party.

"The source of the emails is not connected in any way to any political party," Saviour Balzan told Gatt after the minister hosted a press conference to "share his conjecture" about the source of emails in which Farrugia, the local agent for Trafigura and Total, talks about his meetings with Gatt during his time as minister responsible for Enemalta.

"Our two sources are people who are third parties who are not even remotely connected or linked with any political party."

"Nevertheless, I was careful so as not to divulge any information from the hundreds of emails that the hard-disks contained," Balzan added.

Balzan also explained that the original emails, which implicate Gatt in a series of meetings with George Farrugia, were printed directly off a hard-disk which MaltaToday obtained through its sources.

In his own address, Gatt emphasised that at no point did he attempt to apply pressure on MaltaToday to divulge its sources. "I did not refer to your sources. I did not ask who it is. I would not dare ask you because it would be compete unethical for me, or even the police, to ask.

However, Gatt said that he would be "naïve not to say that these sources might be messengers" and insisted that "if I wanted to hide my hand, I would send someone else along."

"If I want to manipulate an email and lace it on a hard disk, I can do that easily," Gatt said, insisting that doubts remain on the Facebook photo of the email.

A criminal investigation is currently ongoing into kickbacks paid by Trafigura to a former Enemalta consultant in 2004, after MaltaToday broke the story and published invoices paid to Frank Sammut by Trafigura, for a US$ 4 million consignment to Enemalta.

In later emails published first by the Sunday Times and then by MaltaToday, Farrugia was shown to have held meetings with Gatt, leading the minister to categorically deny that he had ever discussed any oil tenders with Farrugia.

READ MORE Replicated emails Gatt will report to Police

Farrugia will turn State's witness to give evidence in the oil procurement scandal.

But on Thursday, Gatt held a press conference at his ministry claiming that one of the Farrugia emails appearing in The Times, showed that a frame-up was underway: as it turned out the email published in The Times had been replicated, using incorrect formatting and also spell-checked, from a photo of the original email appearing in MaltaToday.com.mt on Wednesday, that had been posted to a Facebook profile.

Today Gatt said that it was Labour MP Evarist Bartolo who posted the photo onto Facebook.

He also claimed that the 2004 email published by MaltaToday, in which George Farrugia has an email exchange with a Total representative in which he mentions his meeting with Austin Gatt, has its date carried in the Maltese language [19 ta' Gunju 2004].

Claiming that he was a victim of a frame-up, Gatt said that the Maltese language set for computers was only created in 2006, and not before.

"Who changed the date? Why was the date changed?" Gatt said as he insinuated that the email could have been written by somebody who normally writes in Maltese. He added the emails "could well have been taken out from Farrugia's computer by his feuding brothers," and the negations mentioned in the email could be making reference to the 2008 privatisation process in which the Farrugia brothers were bidders.

48 hours after publicly declaring that he believed MaltaToday's email to be an original email, today Gatt shed renewed doubts on the MaltaToday email. "My supposition, and it's a supposition, is that MaltaToday could have been manipulated," Gatt claimed.

Gatt also hinted that Labour candidates David Farrugia Sacco and Manuel Mallia were connected to the origin of the mails, a notion dispelled by Saviour Balzan's appearance at the press conference. Farrugia Sacco was the lawyer for Farrugia's brothers in a judicial protest they filed against George Farrugia over the alleged siphoning-off of oil profits from Powerplan Ltd; while Mallia was part of an investigative audit into the emails that the John's Group Of Companies (Farrugia's family business before he fell out with his brothers) produced in court.

Gatt went as far as to shed doubt on the presidential pardon granted to Farrugia by the Cabinet of ministers saying: "The more time goes by, the more I am convinced that this is a frame-up. I am getting an Impression that the pardon is annoying Labour," adding that the pardon was the most effective tool in the police investigations."

He also denied having any properties abroad and said that he felt no need to declare his Swiss bank account because no money was deposited into the account.

At about four minutes into the press conference, Gatt also expressed doubts particularly regarding the date in Maltese of the email published by Maltatoday. He alluded to the fact that Microsoft had not yet introduced Maltese date formats in 2004, when the email is dated.

Maltatoday managing editor Saviour Balzan dismissed Gatt's doubts by affirming that "an eventual upgrade of an operating system (e.g. from Windows XP to Windows 7) in a computer, or transferring email data from an old system to a new one with the new date formats regime of 2006 would hence enable emails created with the older date format to inherit the newer system."

"Thus emails created in 2004 with an old operating system with no Maltese regional and language settings would inherit the new settings upon being transferred to a newer computer with an updated operating system proprietary of Maltese settings after 2006, provided data has been transferred in an appropriate manner."

"With regards the 'dot' on G of Ġimgħa is clearly visible," Balzan said.