Demolishing accountability

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob was charged on 27 th August 2026 with failing to declare his assets. He was released on $74,534 bail. If convicted, he faces up to 5 years in jail.

Yet back in Malta, failing to declare your assets is a privilege that Robert Abela has bestowed on his Ministers. Abela still refuses to publish those declarations, last tabled in April 2023, which covered 2022. He rejected an FOI request for them, first arguing that they only existed for his own personal scrutiny and then later invoked cabinet secrecy as his pretext for not publishing them.

Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi repeatedly urged Abela to publish them, describing the Prime Minister’s hard-headedness as a “substantial step backwards for transparency”.

Abela has now gone a step further. His ministers simply stopped making the detailed ministerial declaration altogether. By 2026 Abela moved to formalise that blow to democracy. The Commissioner’s protests that income, investments and spouses’ bank account details would subsequently be concealed were completely ignored by a Prime Minister determined to protect himself and his colleagues from scrutiny. The Commissioner called Abela’s stunt a setback for transparency that sent a “very negative message”.

All this was going on while the notorious Roderick Galdes was going through his own personal struggle with the annoying habit of facts to somehow surface.

In December 2025, Galdes was questioned over his “Sicilian property”. He claimed that he bought the house in 2008. But his first declaration after joining Joseph Muscat’s government in 2013 did not list a property in Sicily. It seems that, like Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Yaakob, Galdes had not declared it. His own stated acquisition date stands in stark contrast with his own published declaration.

By 2022, the Sicilian assets were appearing in Galdes’ declaration. He listed a “house with agricultural land in Sicily” and “part-ownership of further land in Sicily”.

In December 2025, Galdes told the media that “all my assets are declared” and “I have nothing to hide” after the story of the 140,000-euro Joseph Portelli penthouse broke. Yet that Hal-Gelmus penthouse did not appear in either the 2021 or 2022 cabinet declarations.

Galdes claimed that he paid Joseph Portelli’s company a 5000-euro reservation fee in 2021. No such interest appears in those declarations. We still don’t know whether Galdes ever declared that penthouse because Robert Abela refuses to release those declarations.

Land registry research revealed that Galdes and his wife jointly owned three residential units in the Dolomites, apart from properties in Catania, Syracuse and Ragusa. We should be able to take Galdes’ declaration of assets and compare them with the information from the land registries, his property purchase and his loans. But we can’t do that because Abela won’t publish those declarations.

Galdes claimed that his Forni di Sopra property was declared too. But nobody can test that claim because nobody can see his declarations. Galdes defended his accumulating property portfolio by saying he received money from elsewhere, including his spouse and rental income. But Galdes’ tax returns from 2018 until 2024 show that he had no other income other than his ministerial salary.

And Galdes’ borrowing certainly increased – from 173,000 euro in 2014 to 249,000 by 2022.

So, in Malaysia, investigators discover unexplained assets, the anti-corruption authorities demand an asset declaration, and the former prime minister is criminally charged. In Malta, serious questions emerge about a Minister’s growing multinational property portfolio, and the prime minister refuses to publish the very declarations that would allow the public to establish what was disclosed.

At exactly the point when asset declarations were starting to prove their value as an accountability mechanism, Robert Abela made Malta’s system completely opaque.

If Galdes is so convinced that he has “nothing to hide” why won’t Robert Abela publish those asset declarations? Abela declared that everything was “most regular” – but he won’t let anybody else see them.

The Galdes situation raises exactly the sort of questions that the Permanent Commission against Corruption (PCAC) ought to be examining. Yet the PCAC has never sent a single corruption case to the Attorney General in the decades that it has been in existence.

The most recent 2026 European Commission Rule of Law report comments that the PCAC “did not establish that there had been a corrupt practice and hence did not transmit any findings to the AG for prosecution”.

The total number of cases the PCAC has ever transmitted to the AG is zero. The EU Commission’s report politely noted that “the PCAC’s ability to achieve tangible results has not yet been demonstrated”.

Shouldn’t the PCAC investigate Galdes? Serious questions concerning the relationship between his publicly reported income, borrowing and accumulation of assets is now public knowledge. Of course, there could be perfectly lawful explanations for his property empire and discrepancies in his declarations. But they are precisely the sort of red flags that ought to prompt independent verification.

But Robert Abela has made independent scrutiny impossible. That didn’t escape the European Commission’s notice. “Ministers stopped publicly declaring their family income after 2023…further reducing levels of transparency and accountability and making it more difficult to detect conflicts of interest in public decision-making”.

Asset declarations constituted part of a country’s anti-corruption infrastructure. They allow changes in wealth, interests, liabilities and potential conflicts to be compared over time. And that’s exactly why Abela has abolished them.

The Commissioner for Standards in Public Life cannot investigate Galdes. First because he’s no longer an MP. And even when he was an MP, the Commissioner refused to investigate Galdes because of the ridiculous 30 working day/ one year prescription period.

That makes the PCAC much more important in the Galdes case.

The PCAC does not need somebody to refer Galdes to it. Its own rules explicitly state that it can investigate “on its own initiative” and its statutory functions specifically include investigating the conduct of ministers and parliamentary secretaries. It can summon witnesses, demand documents and seek police assistance.

The recent trial has demonstrated how the state failed to protect against the sleazy proximity between politics and business. It exposed the depths of the corruption at the highest level.

Robert Abela’s response has been to demolish any residual safeguards against corruption and to ensure that protection for his pals from prosecution is robustly reinforced.

That’s why Malaysia indicts its former prime minister while Galdes’ asset declarations remain a state secret.