The shadow minister for justice, Jason Azzopardi, broke the ethics rules of the Nationalist Party when he accepted payment of a hotel stay from Raymond Fenech of the Tumas Group in March 2017, the party’s disciplinary commission said in a ruling on Thursday.

Raymond Fenech is the uncle of Yorgen Fenech, who was the CEO of the Tumas Group and is the chief suspect in the October 2017 murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. 

The PN commission said that without in any way condoning the breach of ethics, it had no doubt that the gift, consisting in a three-night stay at the Hilton in Tel Aviv did not influence Azzopardi in his role, including the cause he has taken up against the institutionalisation of criminality and corruption even when the target of his criticism were and still are the members of the Tumas Group.

The commission therefore recommended to the PN Administrative Council that Azzopardi be reprimanded. The council in a statement said it agreed with the recommendation. 

The case was revealed by the Sunday newspaper Illum earlier this month and it was Azzopardi itself who asked the PN commission to investigate. He also suspended himself from the PN parliamentary group.

The commission said it had heard from Azzopardi that he had difficulty finding hotel accommodation in Tel Aviv and eventually sought help from Raymond Fenech, who made arrangements for the three-night stay at the Hilton. (The Tumas Group owns the Hilton Hotel in Malta. The group is also one of the shareholders in Electrogas, the controversial power station company)

Azzopardi paid for the ‘extras’ and on his return to Malta bought a silver gift for Fenech by way of thanks and in order for him to make it clear that he had no obligation to Fenech, the commission said. 

It said that in terms of the party’s ethics rules, the prohibition of acceptance of gifts was mandatory. In the circumstances, there was a breach of ethics independently of the intention of the donor or the donee and independently of the fact that the acceptance of the gift did not influence the politician in the exercise of his duties.

"Particularly in an environment where there is a pressing and urgent need to clean up politics and in order to re-establish trust in the political class, it is imperative that there be coherence between politicians’ words and actions and that all the elected representatives and functionaries of the Nationalist Party should conduct themselves with integrity and correctness in all circumstances,” the commission said.  

In a Facebook statement, Azzopardi said he accepted the commission's decision. 

Read the commission’s report in full by clicking on the pdf below.