Malta police close pre-election jobs probe, citing lack of evidence
Police say allegations against ministers, including Home Affairs Minister Bedingfield, were unsubstantiated. Lawyer Jason Azzopardi insists the investigation was deliberately buried.
Malta police find no evidence in pre-election hiring complaint against ministers
Maltese police have closed their investigation into allegations that government ministers handed out hundreds of public sector jobs to win votes ahead of the June election, concluding that the claims were not supported by the evidence gathered. Times of Malta reported on Tuesday that the force dismissed suggestions the probe had been suppressed as "unfounded".
The investigation concerned a criminal complaint filed by lawyer Jason Azzopardi on June 7, one week after Labour secured its election victory. Azzopardi alleged that some 1,453 people — 743 in Malta and 710 in Gozo — were placed on the government payroll between April 1 and May 29, while a caretaker administration was in office. He argued the hirings amounted to corrupt practices under electoral law and pointed to possible offences under the criminal code, including bribery, trading in influence, fraud and criminal association.
Among the entities named in his report were the cleansing department, then headed by Glenn Bedingfield, who has since been appointed home affairs minister with responsibility for the police. Transport Malta, Wasteserv and several health sector bodies also featured in the complaint.
Azzopardi claimed that former health minister JoEtienne Abela directly or indirectly allowed or ordered the hiring of more than 200 people at the health department in Gozo in the months before polling day. Transport minister Chris Bonett, he alleged, authorised the hiring of dozens of people from the third electoral district at Transport Malta, bypassing others who had been waiting months or years for a position. Former parliamentary secretary Omar Farrugia, Azzopardi added, brought a man into Wasteserv in the weeks before the vote.
Some of the cases described in the complaint were notably specific. Azzopardi told police that six people who had previously worked in the private sector were hired to staff a single public toilet in Gozo, working two-hour shifts each. Dozens of others, mostly in the south of Malta, were taken on during the campaign to clean roundabouts, having left private employment only days earlier. He said a number of newly hired workers were told to stay home and collect their pay because there was no space for them at their assigned workplaces.
The complaint also cited a letter sent on May 29 — the day before voting — by Lawrence Mizzi, chairman of Resource and Support Services Ltd, to former Air Malta workers, promising financial benefits. The General Workers Union sent a supporting letter the same day. Azzopardi described these letters as vote buying and asked police to examine whether the Prime Minister and the head of the civil service were complicit. He also called for a magisterial inquiry to preserve evidence.
After filing the report, Azzopardi sent multiple follow-up requests to police over the following months asking about progress. Receiving no response, he took to Facebook on Tuesday to publicly accuse the force of killing the investigation. "You ordered that these requests for investigations into concrete, verified, precise facts, with names, surnames and dates, be stopped," he wrote. "Because they involve your political masters."
The police rejected that characterisation. In a reply to Times of Malta, they said the allegations "were not substantiated by the evidence available" and were also "contradicted by the evidence gathered by the police". The suggestion that the investigation had been buried was, they said, "unfounded". The force did not disclose what evidence was gathered, who was questioned, when the investigation concluded, or whether Bedingfield played any role in decisions about the case.
Bedingfield responded on Tuesday evening with a Facebook post of his own, saying he would not "accept undue pressure" on the police for partisan political ends. He argued that complaints resting on false facts and hearsay should not be pursued once they have been assessed, as doing so would be unfair to those targeted. "Threats will frighten no one," he wrote. "And yes, everyone must answer for their actions on this earth or elsewhere, especially if they built a career on not telling the truth."
Azzopardi has not publicly responded to the police statement or Bedingfield's post.
Source: Times of Malta