Who is Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando: the government official inciting hatred against journalists

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has three jobs. He is the Chairman of the National Skills Council, Malta’s Ambassador to Rwanda, and a dentist by profession. Despite having two public roles, he still manages to work nearly full-time at his clinic. Between filling cavities and trolling for Labour, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has managed to successfully pig out as much as possible, as is customary with many corrupt Labour Party politicians and associates.

However, JPO, as is more commonly known, wasn’t always a Labour troll. He evolved into one after the Nationalist Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi refused to appoint him as Minister and ever since broke ranks from his party to support Labour. This was during the last PN administration before it lost power to the Labour Party under Joseph Muscat’s leadership – this was a very clear opportunistic move which was also being done by many other corrupt opportunists in PN like John Dalli.

He has always conducted his politics according to his personal interests. He separated from his first wife, Marlene Farrugia, who was a Labour MP and later formed her own party, the Democratic Party. In order to marry his new partner, Carmen Ciantar, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando suddenly reinvented himself as a civil-rights activist and began lobbying for the introduction of divorce. He then became one of the first high-profile beneficiaries of the new law, divorcing Marlene Farrugia in 2011 before marrying Carmen Ciantar in August 2012.

That marriage did not last either. Barely a year later, Daphne Caruana Galizia reported that Carmen Ciantar had left the marital home. Daphne later reported that Ciantar had started proceedings to have the marriage declared null, not merely dissolved by divorce.

Pullicino Orlando’s history was even darker than his cynical divorce activism. Daphne Caruana Galizia reported that, while he was still married to Marlene Farrugia, he kept a gun at home and, during a furious row, pulled it on her before putting the barrel into his own mouth and threatening to kill himself. According to Daphne, his children were present, as was another person who did not belong to the household.

At the time Daphne reported this, Pullicino Orlando was not some private citizen ranting in a bar. He was the executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, in charge of a public institution and public funds. That is the calibre of person successive governments kept rewarding with iced buns and public positions.

His biggest political moment, however, was not under Labour. It came when he was still a Nationalist MP, during the 2008 general election, when the Mistra scandal nearly blew up the PN’s campaign in its final week. Pullicino Orlando was accused by Opposition Leader Alfred Sant of using his political influence to secure a favourable Planning Authority decision for an open-air disco on land he owned in the ecologically sensitive area of Mistra Bay. The project became known as the Spin Valley disco scandal.

At first, Pullicino Orlando denied knowledge of the project and the people behind it. Then, in the final televised leaders’ debate, Alfred Sant revealed the lease agreement showing that Pullicino Orlando had rented out the land for the disco project. The PN had spent days presenting him as the innocent victim of Labour’s mudslinging, only for the contract to expose the truth at the last minute.

JPO’s behaviour during those days was pure theatre and hysteria. He chased Alfred Sant from one press conference to another, trying to confront him wherever he appeared. He then turned up at a Broadcasting Authority press conference at PBS after being supplied with a temporary press card by the Department of Information, effectively being fielded as a PN “journalist” so that he could confront Sant on television. Sant refused to indulge the stunt, and JPO remained there, turning the whole thing into a banal political spectacle.

It did not stop there. During a Nationalist Party activity in Mosta, Pullicino Orlando openly cried and then flew into a hysterical rage, accusing Alfred Sant of mudslinging. The PN used the melodrama to turn him into a victim, while the party tried to survive the scandal in the final days before polling day. After the election, however, the Mistra story continued to unravel. MEPA’s audit report criticised the approval of the permit, the permit was to be revoked, and Pullicino Orlando eventually lost the libel case he had filed against Alfred Sant over the Mistra allegations.

Nowadays, he is projecting the same grifting sense of victimhood against critics of the Labour government, accusing them of hatred while he himself behaves like a government-backed troll. He has not changed. He was always a grifting opportunist with a persecution complex.

However, his biggest poisonous legacy in Maltese politics is his campaign against Daphne Caruana Galizia, whom he repeatedly dragged into his vendetta against Richard Cachia Caruana. Pullicino Orlando claimed that Daphne had told him that Cachia Caruana was involved in efforts to push him out of parliament after the Mistra scandal. Daphne categorically denied this, saying that if Pullicino Orlando had not hidden behind parliamentary privilege, she would have sued him for slander.

Daphne later wrote that she regretted voting for him and supporting him after the 2008 election. She described his attacks on her as a “blackguard’s tirade” driven by personal obsession and hatred. Pullicino Orlando’s pattern was always the same: first he presented himself as the victim, then he turned viciously on anyone who exposed him or refused to participate in his self-serving mythology.

This is the Labour Party of today: oiled up by Malta’s worst grifting opportunists and most poisonous individuals, people who never shared even an iota of the Labour Party’s core and fundamental principles in the first place.