Cristina waited for Ethics Commission ruling to reinstate Mizzi

The PEC’s ruling against Illum editor Julia Farrugia is emerging as the plank for Joseph Mizzi’s rehabilitation, after his embarrassing display at the Eurovision Song Contest after-party in Dusseldorf was caught on amateur footage and went national on maltatoday.com.mt.

Joseph Mizzi has denied being drunk at the party. A self-confessed ‘social drinker’, he told Illum he had drank “two glasses of white wine and four shots of Jaegermeister” and may have had “some bug” on the night.

The day after the footage was publicised, Mizzi added a new dimension to the incident, writing in his resignation letter that he was the victim of ‘foul play’. He filed a report to the Commissioner of Police, and stopped short of telling the PEC his drink was spiked when he alluded to an “unattended Coca-Cola” while greeting the Azerbaijani delegation.

The witnesses who paid tribute to Mizzi’s character – stylist Charmaine Fabri and singer Paul Giordimaina – had not been anywhere near him during the after-party, while another witness, Peter Carbonaro, met Mizzi the day after the incident.

And while Mizzi’s police complaint into allegations of foul play was still pending, the PEC ruled that Mizzi’s state of inebriation could not be verified accurately enough when it was used as the pretext for asking him whether his public position was tenable. And this, it said, was tantamount to ‘character assassination’.

So if Mizzi did not resign for being publicly drunk while on official duty, maybe it was the humility the footage inspired that prompted him to step down.

“The basis for his reinstatement was the good job he had been doing since he was appointed chairman of PBS as witnessed by the ministry and by PBS workers who petitioned me after he offered his resignation; the various statements made by different persons as to his integrity and hard work and the motivations that helped the [Press] Ethics Commission to deliberate on the case he brought before it against the editor of Illum,” Dolores Cristina’s spokesperson said.

Even if police investigations will never establish whether Mizzi was, as he said, the victim of foul play, propping him up as the victim of a character assassination has given him a pardon for having been careless enough to have his groggy display in Dusseldorf caught on film.

Something the PEC established was that there had been no breach of privacy, cementing the unwritten rule that politically appointed and public officials should have a low expectation of privacy – at least when their private behaviour undermines their public duty.

Mizzi’s complaint to the PEC never established what sort of breach of the code of the ethics had been committed, leaving the commission headed by notary Kevin Dingli to wade through the code to find a suitable offence.

Mizzi’s singular point of contention was the allusion that he was drunk, emblazoned on the Illum headline in the colloquial Maltese ‘patata’. The PEC did not relish in the fact that Mizzi’s alleged inebriation had not sufficiently been proven, and this, it said, had undermined the journalist’s intentions.

Many people close to Mizzi have remarked that his Eurovision stupor had been out of character for the publisher. His reputation never having been in question, the reason the ministry accepted his resignation can only be down to the fact the embarrassment the footage elicited was too much for Mizzi to handle.

But in the end, the audacity of having publicised the video had its consequences. If the PEC has been used as a kangaroo court to determine the limits to how a public official should be paraded for his embarrassing – but not drunk – behaviour, then Mizzi’s excellent reputation got the respect it expected.