Bartolo on Facebook: ‘We’re at a crossroads… we can’t protect murderers or money-launderers’

Education minister Evarist Bartolo, one of Labour’s only vocal critics of the way Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi were protected during the Panamagate scandal, has once again taken to Facebook to express his disillusion at the state of affairs in Malta after the arrest of former Tumas director Yorgen Fenech.

“We are at a crossroads,” Bartolo, a Labour veteran, said. “We will be a worse-off country if we protect murderers and money launderers; a better place if justice is carried out with everyone without fear or favour.”

Bartolo’s message comes a day after Fenech was reported to have requested a presidential pardon after having been arrested day by police while leaving the Portomaso harbour in his luxury yacht. Fenech was said to be a person of interest in the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation, and had been identified as the owner of the Dubai firm 17 Black, a company identified as the ‘target client’ of Schembri’s and Mizzi’s secretive Panama firms.

Reading between the lines of his message, Bartolo even harkened back to the founding ideals of the Labour Party, suggesting he wanted to remind activists what the party stood for.

“Some 100 years ago, honest people who loved their country worked to create the Labour Party because they wanted a just society: not only in the redistribution of wealth but also in the safeguarding of the law, where everyone would be equal before the law and not people of wealth or in power ruling over all.”

On Friday, Bartolo once again took to Facebook to call for all necessary steps for justice to be made with those involved in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. “To move forward and turn a new page, all the facts need to be known and all responsibilities shouldered by those implicated in the murder of Caruana Galizia.”