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Saviour Balzan implies that it is my marriage to Daphne Caruana Galizia that has qualified me to be the lawyer appointed to represent the government of Malta in the recent acquisition of an office block – not a house or villa - in Brussels. (The Realm of Richard, MaltaToday, Sunday 18 July 2004).
This implication is offensive and erroneous. Law, like medicine, has its fields of specialisation, and with a few straightforward enquiries you would have discovered what may previously have been unknown to you: that “Mrs Daphne Caruana Galizia’s husband,” as you put it, has been a specialised practitioner in property law for more than two decades, working in this field for private and for corporate clients and as a consultant to the Maltese government.
Given that it is the last of these that appears to hold most fascination for your newspaper, I will avoid putting you to the pains of discovering the facts for yourself, and will list them here. I have worked closely and for some years with the Maltese Government’s Property Division to establish the ownership of expropriated land, and we are talking here of a combined land value very much in excess of the sum paid for the office block acquired in Brussels. In the run-up to Malta’s accession to the European Union, I assisted the Central Bank, the Department of Inland Revenue and the Office of the Prime Minister in drafting amendments to the law that governs the acquisition of immovable property by non-residents, for which Malta successfully obtained a derogation unique among other candidate countries and member states.
Similarly, I assisted the Department of Rural Affairs and the Environment with a scheme relating to government-owned agricultural land. You may be labouring under the delusion that any lawyer can do these things, and that marriage to a newspaper columnist is qualification enough over and above a law degree, in which case I must ask you whether you think it is odd that heart surgery is not performed by general practitioners or family doctors.
My involvement in the negotiations for the purchase of an office block in a prime Brussels location, by the Maltese government, was certainly no happy coincidence, reward or favour, and those who seek to put it forward as such only demonstrate ignorance. It was a tough, long-drawn-out process, with much professional responsibility shared with MIMCOL officials and other consultants, and accompanied always by the premonition of the flippant and spiteful comments that your newspaper would inevitably see fit to make in my regard and that of my wife, who had absolutely nothing to do with the deal or my appointment, and who has been dragged into this by those who, like yourself, wish to turn the acquisition of an appreciable asset into a political point-scoring battle.
Dr Anna Mallia, in an article which she called ‘Save This Country,’ also in MaltaToday last Sunday, chose to belittle my role in the negotiations for the purchase of this office block, claiming that I could have been replaced with a couple of telephone calls by the Attorney General’s office to a lawyer in Belgium. Dr Mallia must have based her criticism on the assumption that the acquisition was simple and straightforward. As a lawyer, she should know that nothing ever is simple and straightforward, and this deal was no exception. I have been advised by many to ignore, as they have, her facetious remarks and will therefore say no more.
Peter Caruana Galizia
BCGL Advocates
Valletta
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