Lou Bondi: Daphne Caruana Galizia is lying blatantly, she is a hypocrite

Lou Bondi on his Facebook page wrote: Daphne Caruana Galizia is lying blatantly on various counts here and I will be talking to my lawyers to bring out the whole truth in open court, especially where Richard Cachia Caruana is concerned.

For now I will only say this. She did not stop talking to me. I stopped talking to her and I know exactly when and why. Following my appointment with the the Fondazzjoni Celebrazzjonijiet Nazzjonali in 2013, she spent months criticising me. I took it all in my stride and just marvelled at the depth of her hypocrisy: She never did the same to Vanni Bonello, Michael Frendo, Helen D’Amato, Simone Mizzi, Oliver Friggieri, Philip Farrugia Randon, and so many others who took the same decision I took: to accept to do a job one is qualified to do.

Yet one day she wrote that I “don’t give priority to my children”. From that moment onwards I never made contact with her again. It was she who subsequently had the gall to send me an sms when Rachel was in hospital giving birth to Clara 8 weeks prematurely. Obviously, I continued to ignore her as I have done for the last three years.

In the general scheme of her allegations, this particular lie on Daphne’s part is a detail. But it does shine a bright light on the extent to which the woman can go to destroy someone so, so unfairly.

I never expected gratitude for being the only one who stuck up for her when everyone – and I mean everyone – scurried away. I was just doing my job as a journalist.

But I have to confess. I never thought that Daphne would do to me what I feared that Labour would do to her on that fateful night.

The above reaction by Lou Bondi came after Daphne Caruana Galizia posted the following blog on her website:

A few days after the general election, Prime Minister Muscat’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, rang Lou Bondi and made him an offer to go on the public payroll as consultant to Valletta 2018 – the organising body for the city’s stint as European Capital of Culture.

But following stiff opposition put up by the new chairman Jason Micallef,

Bondi was instead appointed to the newly created shell Committee for National Festivities and given a €54,000-a-year contract as Prime Minister Muscat’s consultant on ‘national celebrations’.

However, what nobody knows – but I can now reveal – is that when Keith Schembri, who since last February has been embroiled in a massive corruption scandal, rang Lou Bondi to offer him a job, he also asked him whether he thought Richard Cachia Caruana would be interested in working for the Labour government as they wanted to make him an offer.

Schembri asked Bondi to put out feelers on the government’s behalf, and Bondi duly rang Richard Cachia Caruana as the commissioned intermediary for the Labour government. I do not know the nature or contents of the exchange which followed, but both can easily be deduced from the fact that Keith Schembri did not contact Cachia Caruana with an offer once Bondi had reported back to him.

Only a few months earlier, Muscat’s party had organised a mise-en-scene vote in parliament, along with government MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, against Cachia Caruana which led to his resignation as Malta’s permanent representative in Brussels. He has remained a target of the Labour Party/government-sponsored media until today.

I know all the above from Lou Bondi himself, who rang me at the time to ask me what I think. I told him that I was appalled and aghast, and we haven’t spoken since