Grech’s team hope for Joe Giglio bid for PN deputy role

The Nationalist Party’s new ‘heavyweight’ MP Joe Giglio is being tapped for a possible candidature for deputy leader, by Bernard Grech’s team.

A close aide to Grech told MaltaToday the PN leader would welcome Giglio’s bid for the role, soon to be vacated by co-deputy leaders David Agius and Robert Arrigo.

Nominations for the mandatory PN leadership election closed yesterday with Grech’s being the sole candidature.

Sources believe Giglio, a high-profile lawyer whose clients once included the exiled Kazakh oligarch Rakhat Aliyev, will find opposition from party members who think the PN’s top brass cannot afford being compromised by political controversy.

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Like many of the PN’s legal crop of MPs, Giglio’s career as a criminal defence lawyer should not be an obstacle to his growing popularity inside the party – first as an eloquent TV pundit reeled out to prop up the party’s positions, and now elected on both the 9th and 10th districts, a bedrock of PN support.

His election even scuppered the chances of other established MPs, among them Jason Azzopardi, on the ninth district.

Giglio is also seen as a moderate on subjects that tend to be priority targets against Labour by some hardened members of the PN. An example was one recent tweet about Malta’s standing on financial crime: “Can Malta do better? Yes, definitely,” he wrote. “Criticism is healthy but it must also be fair. Other EU countries were also found lagging and since October 2021, several cases were referred to the EPPO. Can our efforts to fight financial crime be more coordinated?

“Yes, there is always room for improvement in everything we do. But isn’t this also the case with every other country in the world?”

Bernard Grech has previously expressed his wish for the PN to have a female deputy leader, with Janice Chetcuti’s name whispered as a potential team player for Grech.

The PN will ditch its second co-leader this year after toying with a similar set-up to Labour’s leadership after 2014.