Minister’s chief canvasser charged with corruption, fraud

Edward Caruana – the chief canvasser of Education Minister Evarist Bartolo – has been arraigned in court. He has been charged with acts of corruption and fraud while acting as an official of the government’s school-building agency, the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools, falsification of documents and bribery. He pleaded not guilty. Mr Caruana’s arraignment arrives more than 15 months after the presentation of a 200-page dossier to the police by the former FTS CEO Philip Rizzo – another person of trust of Mr Bartolo’s. The case goes back to 2016, when according to the claims, Mr Caruana was asking for bribes and cuts in relation to various government works on the building of new schools and maintenance works. In his dossier to the police, Mr Rizzo claimed that the minister’s canvasser used to falsify invoices while the FTS passed on to him more than €8 million in payments to contractors, which Mr Caruana insisted on delivering by hand. It was later discovered that Mr Caruana was, in the meantime, building a block of apartments in Rabat without even taking a bank loan. It was claimed that in one instance, Mr Caruana asked a contractor for ‘a truck of tiles’. Soon after the 2013...