Cardona and Gerada have given up their chance of disproving Brothelgate allegations

A cache of data held under the custody of a magistrate will never reveal the location of economy minister Chris Cardona and his aide Joe Gerada in the brothelgate libel case. After Cardona’s libel case against the late Daphne Caruana Galizia was struck off by a court, Gerada has now ceded his own libel case: with that goes the opportunity to verify whether the minister and his aide had been inside a German brothel while on official business.

The proceedings were instituted by Cardona and Gerada after Caruana Galizia had claimed back in January 2017, that the pair had visited a brothel in Germany while on official government business. The claims were based on an anonymous eyewitness source.

Gerada on Wednesday filed a notice of cessation on the Caruana Galizia case.

In the Cardona case, his lawyer Pawlu Lia said Caruana Galizia’s sons Matthew, Andrew and Paul had not turned up for the sitting, and insisted that the absent party was deemed to have admitted fault. This prompted defence lawyer Joe Zammit Maempel, appearing for the Caruana Galizias, to request that the cases filed by Cardona be deemed to have been dropped on account of the fact that Cardona himself had not shown up for any of the recent hearings. “If you’re going to play these games, we can too,” said Zammit Maempel.

In view of Zammit Maempel’s request, the court ordered that the cases filed by Cardona be struck off.

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Cardona later took the opportunity to say that the Caruana Galizias had taken the opportunity to request that the court “liberate the accused, in this case Daphne Caruana Galizia’s heirs, from the accusations against them.”

“In the following procedure, Magistrate Francesco Depasquale decided to cancel the cases and remove them from the list of cases it presides over,” the minister said. “The application filed today includes a request to the court to preserve call logs and SMS messages in relation to the communications made between the defendant and the source over the relevant period in relation to the stories published by Daphne Caruana Galizia.”

However the data held with the magistrate in the Gerada libel will never see the light of day in a court of law, because the minister’s aide – implicated in the unverified allegations that he was at a brothel in the German town of Velbert with Cardona – has ceded the libel case.