Government paid David Walliams €120,000 to host Malta Film Awards

The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation announced on Monday it had received a copy of the invoice following a two-year legal battle to obtain the information.

“The secrecy of the final amount was fiercely protected by the chief of the Malta Film Commission Johann Grech”, the foundation said.

It called on the government to be completely transparent with its spending and make access to information easier.

The total cost of the Malta Film Week 2022 has been estimated at €1.3 million, three times over-budget, but details on how the public funds had been spent have not been divulged.

In August 2022, the film commission claimed it was “not in a position” to identify how much taxpayers’ money it had spent on the Malta Film Awards.

Most of the published videos of the award show ‘disappeared’ quickly from social media, raising doubts on the long-term effectiveness of the costly marketing stunt.

Unlike the event itself, the controversies surrounding the film commission’s intransparency will go down in history.