De Marco stonewalls on house works, giving Bugeja no quarter

The Nationalist Party’s deputy leader Mario de Marco employed redoubtable stonewalling on Dissett when head of news Reno Bugeja questioned him on the €34,000 works carried out in his home in 2011 which he only paid for in 2016, weeks after an offshore scandal risked embroiling the contractor who provided him the works.

The story was revealed in MaltaToday after the resignation of Adrian Hillman from Allied Newspapers and news of British Virgin Islands offshore companies being used by contractors in the redevelopment of Progress Press, which Allied owns.

Watch how Mario de Marco stonewalls Reno Bugeja over Redmap houseworks

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Since then Mario de Marco has had to defend himself from accusations of having accepted works for free from a Progress Press subcontractor, when he was a Nationalist minister, and only having paid for them after Allied launched an internal inquiry into Hillman’s BVI company.

But on TVM, De Marco steadfastly refused to go into the subject of the allegations that Pierre Sladden of Redmap had provided him the works gratis.

“We’re speaking about this when we’re facing the biggest ever case of corruption in Maltese political history,” De Marco said, referring to the offshore company set up in Panama for minister Konrad Mizzi to settle in an offshore trust in New Zealand.

From the outset, attempts by presenter Bugeja to keep De Marco on message and address the accusations were sandbagged by accusations from the PN deputy leader that the national broadcaster was doing the Labour government’s bidding. “The broadcaster funded by taxpayers is being used as a tool for Castille,” De Marco said.

Bugeja immediately denied the spurious suggestion, saying Dissett had dealt with the Panama Papers in five separate programmes.

“I had works carried out by 20 different contractors. I paid everyone to the last cent. Redmap carried out works based on quotations… I paid for this work,” De Marco said presenting the invoices and cheque references.

De Marco paid for the works in March and April 2016 soon after Allied launched an internal inquiry on Adrian Hillman for having opened an offshore BVI firm during the development of Allied’s printing press at Mriehel. De Marco is a member on the council of the Strickland Foundation, the owner of 78% of Allied Newspapers. Soon after the Panama Papers revelations, it was revealed that Pierre Sladden had also carried out works on Progress Press, and used a Cyprus and British Virgin Islands company for a €1 million payment on these works.

De Marco spent six minutes stonewalling Bugeja on the Redmap works, churlishly inviting his interviewer to “calm down” after Bugeja protested that he was not even being allowed to ask a question.

“The works were not a gift. They were paid for,” De Marco said. “The works were carried out between 2011 and 2015,” he said, before raising the fact that he was in London undergoing cancer treatment throughout 2015 and turning the tables again on Labour.

“Pierre Sladden issued me an invoice, for which I paid,” De Marco said, who previously told MaltaToday that it was Redmap that had delayed issuing an invoice for minor houseworks of plastering and tiling that took years to complete. “The contractor never said he had gifted me the works.”