Austin Gatt gets it wrong on email ‘smoking gun’ lingo

Transport Minister Austin Gatt's claims that the emails published by MaltaToday suggesting that the then energy minister had met oil trader George Farrugia in 2004 could have been manipulated, have been proved false by a simple exercise undertaken by The Malta Independent on Sunday.

Yesterday, Gatt claimed that the 2004 email published by MaltaToday, in which Farrugia has an email exchange with a Total representative in which he mentions his meeting with Austin Gatt, had 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 insisted that the email was manipulated because it could not have had a date in Maltese before 2006.

However, dates on printed emails are determined by the language set on the computer it is printed from, and not by the language set on the computer it was originally created on.

The Malta Independent on Sunday shows that the date's format is not automatically generated when it is sent, but the date is generated according to the computer it is printed on.

The newspaper changed the language on one of its computers to Italian and when printing an email sent out by the Department of Information last Sunday, the date shown on the print-out was in Italian although the email was created and sent out in a different language.

In yesterday's surreal press conference held by Austin Gatt, MaltaToday's managing editor Saviour Balzan explained that the original emails, which name Gatt in a series of meetings with George Farrugia, were printed directly off a hard-disk which MaltaToday obtained through its sources.

Balzan also shot down the minister's claims that the sources of emails showing that the 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. "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.