UPDATE: The Editor of The Shift News sent me a reply along with the sentence of the Court case about Ivan Camilleri against his employer. Ivan Camilleri won the Court case against his employer with a significant compensation package and no evidence was brought for his alleged misconduct. The Court sentence also states that there is no evidence that shows he received payment from Yorgen Fenech and that the last message Ivan Camilleri sent to Yorgen Fenech was on November 19th. The Court also noted that there were also two “Ivans” at the Times when Yorgen Fenech made his payment to “Ivan” and both of them were in contact with Yorgen Fenech. Ivan Camilleri’s previous editor at the Times of Malta stood by his claims that the person who received the payment was Ivan Camilleri.
We verified that the person writing to Yorgen Fenech from WhatsApp was actually Ivan Camilleri the ex-TOM journalist. In addition, Last week, Ivan Camilleri was seen dining with Raymond Fenech of Tumas Group at Għar Lapsi. Indeed, there is no direct evidence that Ivan Camilleri was ever paid by Yorgen Fenech, but Yorgen Fenech also has a consistent history of paying and bribing journalists.
Ivan Camilleri re-wrote a story on a subject we had investigated in detail, with extensive evidence, and published two years ago. We have consistently and always referred to the work of The Shift News. We find it hard to believe that such a “good journalist” would be unaware of a comprehensive and widely followed investigation that was presented with all the evidence: one of the most popular stories on our website, read by tens of thousands of people.
At the same time we believe that The The Shift News is doing very important work and our story about Ivan Camilleri is not a reflection or judgement over the overall work and contribution of The Shift News.
END UPDATE.
Former disgraced journalist Ivan Camilleri is back, plagiarising and repackaging our stories as his own. He’s writing for The Shift News and recently re-wrote our story about the Prime Minister’s property purchase with his wife’s bank account, but failed to mention us as the source.
Ivan Camilleri was fired from the Times of Malta for his misconduct. Apart from being accused of tipping off Yorgen Fenech before his arrest, he was also involved in a significant shop-lifting incident from a Supermarket where he shop-lifted on a regular basis. He won a case in Court against the Times over unfair dismissal.
Ivan Camilleri was one of the journalists in the pockets of Yorgen Fenech, and we also published proof of this. Basically, Ivan Camilleri was taking money from Yorgen Fenech while supposedly investigating him on behalf of the Times of Malta. This is was serious and gross betrayal to his role as a journalist and his employer but his employer could not prove their claims in Court.
Today, he is back at his old tricks again, and probably he is once again working against payment for those he is supposedly investigating. Judge Neville Camilleri, in his document rejecting Jason Azzopardi’s request for a Magisterial Inquiry into Silvio Schembri, confirmed that Minister Schembri submitted a letter from Ivan Camilleri, which was used to justify the rejection of the inquiry. In the letter, Camilleri admitted that the unsigned articles referenced by Azzopardi were written by him. Minister Schembri then used this letter to confirm Camilleri’s authorship and argued that Camilleri was not a credible or trustworthy journalist, citing his past record. You can read the Magistrate’s decision here.
Basically, Ivan Camilleri ended up helping Minister Silvio Schembri avoid an investigation after having investigated him himself. I wonder how much money Ivan Camilleri requested from Silvio Schembri for this service.
There’s even more to this story and I’ll make an exception and quote an article from MaltaToday despite their constant efforts to try and avoid my stories. MaltaToday tried to confirm this story with Ivan Camilleri, and the only thing he told them was “I agree with Saviour Balzan that Jason Azzopardi is a liar.”
Any journalist would consider it an honour to have a Magisterial Inquiry initiated based on their investigation, but apparently not Ivan Camilleri, who believes that Jason Azzopardi is a liar after Jason Azzopardi used Ivan Camilleri’s own work to request the inquiry.
You can’t make this up.
I’m still dumbfounded as to why The Shift News would compromise their integrity by hiring this mercenary to write for them. There are plenty of young journalists out there who are desperate for a job that never took any money from Yorgen Fenech. Why risk your integrity when you can chose someone else?
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
Leave a Reply