Saviour Balzan, the corrupt and fraudulent owner of MaltaToday penned a two-page article on MaltaToday to attack me, instead of rebutting and addressing the serious stories about him. He wrote a two-pager full of lies where he distorted facts in the most blatant self-serving manner. He also calls me a “terrorist”, because, according to this criminal, investigative journalists are terrorists.
Saviour Balzan wants to give the impression that I blackmailed him for 100,000 and that I am looking for an “interest-free loan”. He did this to try and diminish my reliability. Instead of addressing the issue at hand, he is attacking the messenger and the journalist delivering the stories.
All my friends and those close to me, know that I am currently looking for a loan to fund my start-up and business. I also have an employee. I am trying to do the right thing by raising money legitimately, potentially from friends and allies and people who may agree with me. I have been friends with Saviour Balzan for a long time, so of course, he was one of the few people I approached. Saviour was even a sort of client of mine and even admitted in his article to buying my ebook in 2021 at a premium price. I have literally pitched business proposals to not more than six Maltese individuals because I don’t want to compromise my work and would like to remain independent. Given that Saviour was a client of mine and even a friend, I made the pitch to him.
Saviour Balzan refused my pitch and instead promised me a consultancy funded by EU funds. I was elated by this, of course. During this meeting, there was also one of his employees present who can testify to this.
He says I applied for a job with MaltaToday and he interviewed me. This was in 2010 – when I first started writing for the Maltese press. It is strange that he says how I am not so important in his life, yet remembers this fact.
Saviour Balzan lies and says that I am being funded by Labour Ministers. The only funds I have received from a government ministry were 3,000 last year from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the promotion of a Maltese-Palestinian author in London last year for which I spent up to 10,000 in total in the whole project. Given that Saviour Balzan has taken the liberty to lie about me in such an abusive manner about something he knows is not true, I will be proceeding to sue him and file a libel case. I will be filing my libel case tomorrow as soon as I am in Valletta. I am self-funded and I fund myself and I understand this is hard for Saviour to believe whose cash-flow rate is measured by his propensity to lick criminal ass, but it’s true. I have no major donor backing me and I don’t do PR for anyone.
I could have gotten much more from Saviour Balzan if I wanted to, but eventually, it was I who decided to break off my relationship with Saviour Balzan and MaltaToday and this was because of Saviour Balzan’s fraudulent and deceiving way he lied about the Jean Paul Sofia inquiry. This was a hard decision which took me some time to go through. Losing Saviour as a friend meant I would lose a client and many opportunities. I did it anyway because I was not comfortable befriending someone who was fraudulently conspiring with a Prime Minister against a Magistrate for an inquiry which had become nationally important.
Unlike Saviour Balzan, I am not a bitter idiot, and I will not lie like him by telling you, what a bad person he is and how I have always hated him. Saviour Balzan is emotionally and intellectually immature with the brain of a child and he will lie, stamp his feet and say bad things about you if he thinks you have crossed him. Unlike Saviour Balzan, I do not change my assessment of people just because they criticise me.
I don’t need to lie. Saviour Balzan managed to build an independent newspaper and I used to admire him for it. He used to like me and admire me too and he used to shower me with praise and advice whenever I spoke to him. He was always very nice to me and he never said anything wrong or bad about me to anyone. When I simply asked him about his chats with Yorgen Fenech, he went straight to court telling the police I was blackmailing him – I wasn’t but this seems to be his character – he turns hostile when you criticise him and his hostility verges on the violent, aggressive, neurotic and psychotic. He then removed his complaint because there was no basis for it and even his ex-editor Matthew Vella advised him against it. Until then I hadn’t even made my pitch to him and he had already reported me to the police that I was blackmailing him! He then apologised to me after dropping his case and told me that he had no problem that I was investigating his chats with Yorgen Fenech. He is so stupid that he published the email I sent him, with the date being much later after he had made his report to the police. I’m glad he still has that email because I will be asking him to present in court as part of my evidence against him.
Today, Saviour Balzan has turned is one of the worst corrupt fixers in our political scene and a man who destroyed the free market in the press and compromised it with his conspiracies and schemes. Today, he is the equivalent of a criminal abettor and supporter. A supporter of murderers and criminals who calls journalists “terrorists” and tries to shame them for building their business.
I have no shame in what I am doing and I can hold my head up high because, unlike Saviour, I never financed myself by associating myself with the Mafia or promoting corrupt politicians. I am very proud that I am doing the right thing and that I am building everything legitimately without compromising my independence and ideas. I also feel no shame in having financial struggles given this the start of my business. I am too proud of surviving to be ashamed of the troubles that I have that are also shared by any early entrepreneur. I have no support in what I am doing, and I’m mostly alone. I would have preferred if my industry had peers with whom we could be guided and supported accordingly. Instead, we have peers who conspire with criminal politicians, and murderers and then call us terrorists for criticising and exposing them.
You can read Saviour Balzan’s article below.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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