From all the things that came out last week, we can safely assume that Education Minister Justyne Caruana has a thing for men who love football.
Of course, she can be dating Cristiano Ronaldo for all I care, it is of no interest to me whom she, er, scores with. However, since she happens to be a public officer, elected to represent us in parliament and we pay for her salary through our taxes, it is of imperative interest to us if her football men create a major conflict of interest or make her act in a way that is downright corrupt.
Let’s do a bit of a run-through, shall we? Up to two years ago, Caruana was the minister of Gozo married to Silvio Valletta, the deputy police commissioner who was in charge of the investigations into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Valletta loves football. You may recall that he was the guy who, in September 2018, travelled to London with Yorgen Fenech – the business mogul who was then already a suspect in the assassination – to watch a football match at the stadium of Chelsea football club.
The two men sat together in business class on an Air Malta flight and Fenech was heard telling his son to “hold Uncle Silvio’s hand”. They watched Liverpool hold Chelsea to a 1-1 stalemate from a private box at the stadium.
They were such good friends, the two of them, that there’s even a video of them “fooling around” in Fenech’s luxury Rolls Royce, with Valletta behind the wheel pretending it’s his. All this would have been easily dismissed as boys and their toys, had it not been for the fact that the ‘boys’ in question were a police suspect and a police investigator.
A few days after that football trip (and when we still did not know about it), a Court of Appeal ruled that Valletta could no longer be involved in the investigation into the assassination of Caruana Galizia because of his marriage to a government minister. His presence, the court ruled, breached the fundamental rights of the journalist’s family.
Valletta retired from the police force almost a year later, in August 2019, and Fenech was arrested and charged with his involvement in the murder in November 2019.
Round about that time, thanks to investigative journalism, stories about that football game trip surfaced. Valletta at that point said that his “relationship with his wife was a professional one in that they did not discuss work”.
Funny that. So, his relationship with his wife was a professional one but his relationship with a police suspect was an intimate one.
His then-wife, Caruana, said she was unaware. To be more precise, she uttered a string of legalese words: she was “totally extraneous” to what had been reported and she had “no connection to the facts”.
A very odd way of saying that you have no idea of your husband’s trips and friendships.
This is more than a red card. In football terms, this would be the equivalent of a FIFA ban for life- Kristina Chetcuti
After much pressure, and with her main protector, Joseph Muscat, gone in disgrace, Caruana resigned her Gozo ministry at the end of January 2020. In the months that ensued, the couple separated.
But it did not take long for her to join cabinet again; by November 2020 she was reinstated, this time as education minister. And barely had the pen on her new appointment dried, that football did it again. Her eyes turned in the shape of hearts for a certain Daniel Bogdanovic, a football star who, once upon a time, played for Barnsley and Sheffield United in the UK and now plays for… Xewkija Tigers, in Gozo.
Again, no harm in that, except that, three months into her run as education minister, Caruana granted Bogdanovic, who has no pedagogical qualifications, a three-month contract worth €5,000 a month. His job was to visit government schools and write a report on how to improve the national sport school.
When the media found out about this, the newly elected prime minister, Robert Abela, acted shocked and said he had scrapped the controversial contact “as soon as [he] found out about it”. However, Bogdanovic was still paid and has continued working at the ministry, sometimes accompanying the minister on school visits.
The commissioner for standards in public life was asked to investigate the matter and, last week, issued a damning report. He concluded that Caruana seriously breached ministerial ethics for giving preferential treatment to her close friend, for granting him a direct order for a job he was incapable of doing and for hiding his gross incompetence (his work was in actual fact carried out by a consultant in Caruana’s ministry, with the minister’s approval). So shocking were the findings that MPs were asked to consider that the findings be passed on to the police for criminal investigation.
This is more than a red card. In football terms, this would be the equivalent of a FIFA ban for life. And, yet, Caruana stays on, leading the charge to educate our children, when she herself is the worst example of an educator. She is corrupt but will stay on because the police won’t investigate her – just like they haven’t investigated MPs Rosianne Cutajar, Edward Zammit Lewis, Konrad Mizzi and former MPs like Muscat and Chris Cardona.
With peers like these, who needs enemies?