Daphne caught lying

Publicist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia has vehemently denied having informed PN backbencher Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando that she had been asked to attack him through her articles. And yet, the same Daphne Caruana Galizia had confirmed as much herself in blog-posts and articles she had written in 2008.

Nationalist backbencher MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando this week testified in court that he had been informed by Caruana Galizia, among others, that they had been told to ‘attack’ him in the wake of the Mistra controversy of 2008. 

He was testifying in libel proceedings by Malta’s permanent represesentative to the European Union, Richard Cachia Caruana against Mediatoday editor Saviour Balzan, who had written that Cachia Caruana was behind the invective and hate attacks on those who stand in his way, or that of government policy.

Reacting to Pullicino Orlando’s testimony, Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote on her blog: “I cannot believe that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando said that under oath. I can’t. That he imagines the secret service is tapping his telephone, I can believe. That he fed his party leader a load of hogwash about Mistra, I can believe too.

“But lying under oath? He must be spending far too much time with Consuelo Herrera, who did it so often when she spoke in court twice in ‘my’ case that I gave up taking notes.

“Il-vera birds of a feather, marelli. Incredible.”

Caruana Galizia then listed out a number of categorical assertions:

“1. I did not tell Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando that I had been told to attack him.

“2. I was not told to attack him.

“3. Nobody tells me what to do, say or write, and famously so. They don’t tell me because they know it’s pointless. I am 100% non-malleable and it is my most screamingly obvious character trait, so you have to be a really poor judge of people not to see this.

“4. The person who is least likely to tell me what to do, say or write is – in fact – Richard Cachia Caruana, who has known me since I was 24 years old, for the very reasons described in point 3 above.”

But from comments made three years earlier – to be precise, on 23 March 2008 - the same blogger, who is described as a ‘merchant of hate’ by Godfrey Grima, wrote: “The tension about this case is not being created by JPO, but by those within the Nationalist Party who are whipping up public opinion against him. Public opinion, if not whipped up and focussed, simply forgets and moves on to more pressing matters. When you have people within the media who are being called, spoken to, fed a line, etc, this is what happens: you get two or three leading articles on the same day (today) calling for the man’s resignation. I know because I too was at the receiving end of a telephone call, and was extremely cross about it.”

On the same day she wrote again in The Independent: “It is a serious business indeed when a political party brings its machine to bear, whipping up public opinion, against an MP it wishes to rid itself of while keeping his seat. It is the kind of thing one might have expected of Dom Mintoff.

“All efforts by some elements within the Nationalist Party to force Pullicino Orlando to vacate his seat drive right against our particular form of representative democracy, which is rooted in individual MPs and not in political parties, as spelled out in our Constitution. That seat does not belong to the Nationalist Party. It belongs to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. I have to repeat that in our system of representative democracy, MPs are answerable only to their constituents – or more precisely, to those who elect them.”

In 2008 Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando was embroiled in allegations that he had pressurised the Malta Environment and Planning Authority to issue a permit for a discotheque on land belonging to him on Mistra. 

Testifying in court this week, Pullicino Orlando said that Mrs Caruana Galizia had informed him at the time that she had been told to attack him in the Mistra saga. He said that he also heard of this from other journalists including Vanessa Macdonald. When asked who the other journalists were he said he couldn’t remember. When asked if the person was Richard Cachia Caruana, he answered rather evasively that he could not exclude this.  But he did not confirm.

Richard Cachia Caruana is today a minister without portfolio in the Gonzi cabinet and also serves as Malta’s permanent representative in Brussels. 

When questioned about Mrs Caruana Galizia’s writings about him, Mr Pullicino Orlando said that the blogger had attacked him for his stand on the proposed development at St John’s Co Cathedral.  

Pullicino Orlando’s objection to the project was reportedly fuelled by his disagreements with Richard Cachia Caruana, whom he privately blames for the backlash after the 2008 election in the Mistra affair.

Cachia Caruana sat on the Cathedral’s foundation’s committee and was passionately in favour of the extension.  Another opponent of the extension, Astrid Vella of Flimkien ghall-Ambjent Ahjar, was also personally attacked on Caruana Galizia’s blog. 

When asked about other dissenting voices in the PN, who were also the target of attacks, Pullicino Orlando insisted that they were not ‘dissidents’ but politicians doing their work. When asked to mention who were the so called ‘dissidents’ he mentioned Robert Arrigo, Franco Debono, Jesmond Mugliett and Jean Pierre Farrugia: all Nationalist MPs who were ‘attacked’ on the same blog.

The case is remanded till 26 May, when more evidence is expected to be presented linking Richard Cachia Caruana as the main strategist of the Nationalist party to organise concerted attacks on dissenting PN activists and critics of the Nationalist party. 

Cachia Caruana has recently been called back to head the strategy of the Nationalist Party and has been instrumental in planning the media campaign together with the friendly media to show how well Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi is handling the Libya crisis.