Malta: Shady People in a Sunny Place
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The island of Malta is the European Union's smallest state. Yet it is giving Brussels one of its biggest headaches.
After the very public blowing up in her car of an investigative journalist in 2017, the slow investigation into her death took a dramatic turn earlier this week with the sudden resignation of the prime minister. Some of his closest associates have also gone.
But what are the reasons for this development? Why has Malta become the centre of such attention and scrutiny after centuries of relative obscurity? What do its travails tell us about modern European economies and the rule of law? And why does the European Union seem to struggle at ensuring political accountability among its member states?
David Aaronovitch invites us into The Briefing Room to discover the answers.
Editor Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:08.0 | Picture a room full of charts, maps, whiteboards and reference books, |
| 0:12.3 | and into it come the top experts who have half an hour to tell us what we most need to know |
| 0:16.9 | about the things that matter. |
| 0:19.1 | And that thing this week is Malta, the EU state where two years ago a journalist was |
| 0:24.6 | assassinated in her car and where the investigatory trail has led right to the peak |
| 0:29.8 | of the establishment. |
| 0:31.6 | And if you enjoy this podcast, you'll probably like some of our other episodes, including |
| 0:35.7 | ones on post-election taxis, meat-eating and Brexit. |
| 0:39.8 | You can find them all on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:48.9 | That was the background in Valletta on Monday, |
| 0:56.8 | after the Prime Minister of Malta announced his resignation, |
| 1:00.1 | and you may be thinking, I didn't even know Malta had a Prime Minister, |
| 1:03.9 | and anyway, what's all that got to do with the price of fish? |
| 1:07.1 | I want to know too. |
| 1:09.0 | So step into the briefing room to discover why he's going, how it all began with the murder of a journalist, |
| 1:14.6 | and why what is happening in its smallest state has such big implications for the European Union. |
| 1:25.6 | Let's start with what happened just over two years ago. |
| 1:32.6 | My first expert in the briefing room is Michael Peel, the EU diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times. |
| 1:39.5 | In October 2017, the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb very shortly after leaving her home. |
| 1:50.0 | Daphne Caruana Galizier was an extraordinary high-profile figure in this Mediterranean island state. |
... |
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