I was never going to write this piece because this is about petty local culture politics However, seeing the same authors who sneer and wage underhanded campaigns against me only to then pose for pictures with the same Minister of Culture who insulted Daphne Caruana Galizia, makes my blood boil and I will expose the corruption and hypocrisy of these individuals.
As I said this is about petty politics and this will probably be boring. However I feel bound to write and record these happenings for posterity especially for those who would pick up my work in the future. I am trying to build a press outlet and those who come in the future need to be aware of the risks I faced.
When Oliver Friggieri died, I attended the State funeral in my role as Executive Chairman of the National Book Council. This was shortly before I was brutally and coldly dismissed after eight years of service to the State.
At the State Funeral the OPM officials sent me back and refused me entry. It was the beginning of a very long campaign of attempted humiliation directed personally by Prime Minister Robert Abela with the aim to make an example out of me. I was one of the only Labour Party delegates and government executives who spoke up about Daphne’s murder and the political cover-up by Castille. The Prime Minister wanted to ensure that I am made an example of to bring in line any other rebels within the party and the government.
The aim of the Prime Minister was to reduce me without any sources of living so as to crawl back to the Labour Party begging for scraps. The Prime Minister wanted to offer me a job as the curator of the Museum of Parliament in exchange for my silence. I did not take the role. I knew that I was being humiliated and suppressed and I would have never accepted any kind of offer in those distressing conditions.
This was the point in my life where I was losing everything.
I was dismissed in the most brutal manner. In order to humiliate me, the Prime Minister personally replaced me with a namesake. This person has no business leading the National Book Council and publishers have already called for his resignation, but he is kept on by Labour simply for his success at discriminating against me.
The first thing that the then Permanent Secretary Frank Fabri did to the National Book Council and to the employees when I was dismissed was to order them explicitly not to speak to me. It was the beginning of an attempted campaign of isolation. At that point, many writers who were my friends stopped speaking to me and betrayed me overnight. Being associated with me in the world of culture could get you defunded by the National Book Council. Very few were those who had the courage to stand by me and I will forever be grateful to this heroes.
This is not my personal opinion: it was also decided by the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court decided that the National Book Council discriminated against me in one instance after it refused to publish a review of one of my books for political reasons. The Chairman was not asked to resign after this sentence: on the contrary he was awarded with a further contract renewal. For all intents and purposes in the eyes of the Prime Minister he was doing his job correctly at cutting me off from public resources.
The National Book Council is explicitly acting as my commercial competitor by consistently subsidising and supporting my direct competitors in various ways while cutting me off from any potential support. We can fight this in the Courts as we are currently doing but the discrimination and the pressure is so systemic and so expansive that it will takes many Court cases to end this. We are currently engaged in legal action with Alkagesta over massive SLAPP action so we have postponed our legal fights against the government which we promise will continue.
The government has cut me off from all support networks that feed Malta’s artists and intellectuals. In my government post I was one of the most successful cultural bureaucrats in Malta. I entered my role during a time when the book industry was literally dying with some of my friends in the industry getting terminally sick with overwork and stress. I inherited a very serious and problematic situation which put a lot of pressure on me to do the right thing and focus exclusively on my work. I used to be stressed at handling public funds, fearing I would fail to extract value from public money, and I was so stressed in my role that I lost many sleepless nights worrying about the best use of public funds. My efforts paid off because I saved the industry, I bumped up sales to record highs and started a massive export campaign that took Maltese literature across the globe.
During these years I missed my chance of doing a Phd or to get rich with multiple government contracts as other intellectuals like Vince Marmara were doing. Nowadays I am cut off from the support network of the University of Malta as well. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts Dominic Fenech has repeatedly and explicitly literally called on his friends and colleagues to boycott me – telling them “you are not my friend if you are a friend of Mark Camilleri”.
So, basically, the Labour government has cut me off from all possible support networks. I have no prospect of employment in Malta either in academia or in the cultural bureaucracy. Meanwhile, artists and writers are secretly awarded by unscrupulous government executives for denouncing me and criticising me in public. The government has intentionally created a massive incentive for people in the arts industry to discriminate against me – some unprincipled and very mercenary authors have taken this opportunity in full.
When I won the Constitutional Case in Court against the National Book Council I finally had the Prime Minister’s attention and the government accepted my claims for compensation. I was foolish enough to request a €25,000 contract of work. My total expenditure on the Constitutional Court case reached up to €10,000. Due to my anxiety about handling public money, I low-balled myself in my compensation claims because I didn’t want to “pig out”.
The contract was nonetheless a small relief in compensation to all the discrimination that I had faced. I did my job properly and correctly and took up to six months to write the report. It has not been published yet. You can download it here. The Arts Council doesn’t care about this report and they won’t implement it.
When I presented the report, I met the Arts Council executive responsible for the funds. I am not going to name this individual because I have nothing against him and I don’t want him to think that “I am attacking him”. However, the brutal reality is that this person, who is responsible for managing millions of Euros of funds, revealed during the meeting that he didn’t know the difference between capital and recurrent expenditure and I had to explain it to him.
This is an executive who is paid more than €5,000 per month. Luke Dalli, who got his post as a favour by the Prime Minister, has a salary of up to €14,000. My salary in the equivalent position at the National Book Council was €3000 – €4000 a month.
Some particular individuals took opportunity of my contract to lash out against me and curry favour with Labour politicians. Maria Galea, who today describes herself as a “Culture strategist” (whatever that means) issued a press release on behalf of the MEIA that the contract was irregular and that it should not have bee awarded because it was uncompetitive. She didn’t issue the same press release for the appointment of Luke Dalli and other multiple contracts awarded by the government in the culture scene. I was singled-out because Maria Galea is not a genuine lobbyist for the arts: she is a lobbyist for herself and is extending her own personal interests through the MEIA. This is why she now fancies herself as a “cultural strategist” after lobbying the government to open up the arts economy during Covid. Maria Galea wants government jobs and funds for a comfortable role in the cultural bureaucracy and she sees me as her direct competitor. Attacking me publicly is one of her ways to gain the trust of Labour politicians.
Another individual who issued a press release against me was Glenn Calleja with his very fraudulent organisation called HELA. Glenn Calleja is currently feeding himself with three distinct sources of revenue all from public funds. He receives a public salary as an Arts Council executive, receives funds from the Arts Council and other entities for his commercial artistic products and is also receiving funds for his supposed NGO which only serves to enable him further work and funding.
Glenn Calleja is a literal fraud who always harboured a degree of envy and spite against me so he needs to fraudulently pretend he is fighting for justice when he ingratiates with Labour to attack me publicly. Glenn Calleja ahs recently posed for a photograph with the Culture Minister at the National Book Prize.
Unfortunately, I am also cut off from any Arts Council funding and the presence of executives like Glenn Calleja himself does not help me. Before receiving the Arts Council contract I tried to apply for funding to promote a book I published in the UK – a real Maltese literary export. It was the first time that I had applied for funds with the Arts Council. The Arts Council rejected my application on spurious technical grounds including for failing to present evidence about my tax registration and I was left without any funding. In that same year, Glenn Calleja was awarded up to €20,000 in funds and resources by the National Book Council to promote himself at the London Book Fair. I don’t have these opportunities under Labour.
But that’s not all. As you can see below, the Arts Council issues a yearly fund to newspapers to write about culture. This is a fund specifically designed by Saviour Balan and he is in fact its biggest recipient. There is a catch however – the fund is only available for physical newspapers so we are excluded. Basically, while Labour’s propogandists have their culture sections sponsored by the government, I pay for the culture section of my press outlet from my own pocket.
Already five years have passed since the government systematically tried to destroy me and here I am still standing. I have paid a great personal price to be here. I missed out on having a family and I can no longer live in peace in my own country. Having children in my own home country is absolutely out of the question for security reasons. I only do my work as a sense of duty and responsibility to my country, but also to make sure that my enemies don’t get their way with shutting me up: every successful businessman has that sense of spite that provides perseverance.
I have paid a massive price to be here and I have lost everything. I have no support system and the institutions which are supposed to support me are in direct competition against me, and this is Labour’s point – Labour wants to set an example out of me to send the message that opposing Labour is deadly and catastrophic. I prefer to give up, leave and never show my face again in Malta to live the rest of my life in peace, but I have a massive responsibility to ensure that the government does not win because if I fall the message for the opposition would be catastrophic.
So I will be here to stay. And I will fight as long as necessary to make sure that The Maltese Herald is successful because I can never permit that organsied crime and corrupt politics shuts down an independent press outlet – even if it means forfeiting my personal life forthis project.
Note that the betrayals and the political ingratiation in the writing community have gone beyond my personal case. There have been individuals in the writing community who have committed very serious and aggravating betrayals against other writers. For now I am unable to speak about these cases but the time will come.
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Historian and Publisher
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