Welcome back to our series about the hospitals concession. I hope you managed to get by without us
Clutching at straws
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Today, we were present for a hearing in the case of the state v disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat and the other accused.
The entire hearing was dedicated to the testimony of just one court expert – Sam Sittlington. For over five hours, this expert replied to an avalanche of questions from the defence.
These questions covered practically every aspect of this expert’s involvement in not just this inquiry, but even in judiciary processes in other countries. Just to give you an idea of the level of detail that the defence went into, they even asked him about a note on his LinkedIn profile which stated that, years ago, the witness briefly worked as an extra on a couple of films.
The expert had to leave the hall for a few seconds before he could utter a single word. He did so because Joseph Muscat’s lawyer asked the court’s permission to question the witness’ integrity and impartiality as an expert.
That’s right, you heard it. The lawyer of the prime minister who won the dubious honour of the Most Corrupt Man of 2019 wanted to ask questions about the credibility of a court-appointed expert.
For almost four hours, the defence – subject to repeated interventions and protests from the court and the prosecution – did what it could to undermine the credibility of the witness as if he were dragged into court in handcuffs.
In a not-so-subtle manner, the defence implied that this court expert requested more information about the accused after the police force apparently failed to get back to him about a service proposal worth just shy of a million euros.
From Sittlington’s testimony today, however, it results that he wasn’t the one who had approached the police to offer training services for new recruits. It was police commissioner Angelo Gafa’ who asked for his assistance, which led to the expert coming up with a proposal that was seemingly rejected.
Wait a minute.
How does the defence know about internal discussions which the witness swears were held solely with the police commissioner and ex-assistant commissioner Alexandra Mamo?
In fact, the witness himself was alarmed about this. He explicitly told the court that he was concerned about the fact that sensitive discussions had somehow been leaked to someone who should not have access to them.
And that’s not all – they asked him about what seemed like a private conversation between the witness and another person on LinkedIn, about whether he ever had any contact with Repubblika or any journalists, about a legal conflict that had arisen between the witness and the Guyanese government, a conference in which the witness was denied a speaking role due to media coverage about the legal conflict…
As we said – more than five hours spent on a witness whose job was to gather evidence on behalf of the inquiring magistrate.
We hope that it will not be long until we arrive at the point in which there is space for these kinds of questions about those who actually participated in a fraudulent concession
Read today’s Live Blog
Next Live Blog: Thursday, 3 October, 09:30
