The Foreign Minister will see you after court

On 10 May 2024, Chris Fearne did something rare in Maltese politics. Charged with fraud and misappropriation over the hospitals deal — the 2015 privatisation of three state hospitals that the courts annulled in 2023 — he resigned as Deputy Prime Minister and withdrew as Malta’s candidate for the European Commission. He denied wrongdoing, and still does. Stepping aside, he said, was the right thing to do.

He was right. And for two years, Robert Abela seemed to agree.

On 4 June 2026, four days after Labour’s fourth consecutive election win, Chris Fearne was sworn in as Minister for Foreign and European Affairs. A court decided in 2024 that there was enough evidence for him to stand trial. He has not stood it yet. Nothing about the case has changed. Asked about it, the Prime Minister said he had had “no hesitation”.

Between 2024 and 2026 the charges did not change. The only thing that changed was the election result.

This is not about guilt

Let us get the obvious out of the way. Chris Fearne is presumed innocent. He may well be acquitted, and if he is, he will be owed more than a ministry. Nobody on this page is suggesting otherwise.

The question is not whether he did it. The question is whether a man being prosecuted by the Republic should, at the same time, be representing the Republic in every capital in Europe. In 2024 Fearne himself said no. So, in accepting his resignation, did his Prime Minister. That standard was not invented by the opposition or by the NGOs. It was theirs.

Standards that last exactly as long as they are convenient are not standards. They are weather.

And then there is the Equality ministry

The same cabinet gave Rosianne Cutajar the Ministry for Equality and Civil Rights. Cutajar left government in 2021 over a property deal involving Yorgen Fenech, and in July 2021 the Standards Commissioner found she had breached the code of ethics by failing to declare income from it — a finding MPs from both sides of the House later adopted. In 2023, after thousands of private messages between her and Fenech were published, she left Labour’s parliamentary group. According to reporting at the time of the reshuffle, she turned down a parliamentary secretary’s post and held out for a full ministry. She got one.

Whatever one thinks of her, it takes a particular kind of confidence to hand the civil rights portfolio to a politician whose last stint in government ended with an ethics finding, and to do it in the same summer that the man at the other end of that property deal went on trial for the murder of a journalist.

Why it matters beyond the headlines

The European Commission has published a Rule of Law Report every year since 2020, and Malta’s chapters keep returning to the same themes: the independence of institutions, and whether integrity rules are actually enforced. The Foreign Minister is the person who sits across the table in Brussels and argues that those problems are fixed.

It is a tough brief when you are due in a Valletta courtroom on fraud charges. It is tougher when everyone in the room knows you resigned over those same charges two years ago, and that the only thing that brought you back was a vote count.

Robert Abela has been Prime Minister since 2020, long enough for his standards to be judged by what he does rather than what he says. And this is what they look like when tested: the moment it costs something to keep the rule, the rule goes. Dritt ġol-ħajt.