Culture Minister Owen Bonnici has insisted he amended the answer to a parliamentary question due to a "typo" and not because it sparked a request to investigate a junior minister. 

Bonnici had initially told parliament that the firm 'Lex Group Ltd - Legal Entity' was being paid an €800 monthly retainer to serve as legal counsel to Fondazzjoni Ċentru Kreattivita, a state-run entity.

Lex Group is owned by Labour whip and parliamentary secretary Andy Ellul and the PQ reply prompted academic and independent candidate Arnold Cassola to write to parliament's standards commissioner, asking him to investigate Ellul.

However, hours after Cassola made that request public, the PQ reply was amended to say that a different company with a similar name, Lex Group Legal, was the one providing its services to the foundation. 

The original PQ reply.

The amended PQ reply.

It is not clear who owns Lex Group Legal. Publicly available data shows that Ellul was listed as its managing partner until early 2022, when he was coopted to parliament. 

Ellul told Times of Malta on Tuesday that he had stopped working as a lawyer when he assumed the role of Parliamentary Secretary [in March 2022].

On Wednesday, PN MP Paula Mifsud Bonnici asked Bonnici to clarify whether the PQ had been amended as a result of Cassola’s request for an investigation. 

Bonnici replied that this was not the case and that the similarly named company had been listed on the PQ in error. He referred to the mistake as a “typo”. 

Junior Minister Andy Ellul. Photo: Jonathan Borg

“Lex Group Ltd has never had a relationship with Spazju Kreattiv and it was listed in error,” Bonnici said. “When he noticed it, the CEO of Spazju Kreattiv informed me of this mistake and I corrected it. It was simply a typo.” 

However, Mifsud Bonnici pushed back at the minister’s answer, saying that the version currently uploaded on the parliament’s website still lists LEX Group Ltd in the replies. 

“Can you tell us which version is true?” she said. 

Bonnici replied that while he had no control over the management of parliament’s website, he was adamant that the amended version of the PQ is the correct one. 

Speaker Anġlu Farrugia chimed in to confirm that while the correction had been tabled in parliament on Monday, it had not yet been uploaded to the website.