Lawyer Adreana Zammit, who terminated her services for Transport Malta after the direct orders she was given were publicly exposed, blamed the media for having to stop working for the Maltese authority.
The Lens obtained a copy of Zammit’s letter of resignation (see bottom of page) dated 21st April from Transport Malta. In it, she blames unnamed media outlets for ‘unjustly’ being used as a political football. What she doesn’t mention is that she was handed a direct order months before obtaining her lawyer’s warrant, as revealed by the Times of Malta. The contract was worth over €60,000.
Dr Zammit was working in Malta, a small island nation south of Italy which is also part of the EU. Malta currently ranks 52 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. In 2020, Malta’s prime minister had to resign in disgrace after people in or close to his cabinet were being linked to the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017.
In her letter of resignation, Zammit said she never wanted to end her working relationship with Transport Malta. On the 19th of April, Malta’s largest news outlet revealed that “just one year after graduating, [Adreana] Zammit was paid at least €108,542 in direct orders for her legal services.”
Further investigations by another media outlet, The Shift, revealed that Zammit’s pay almost tripled in only 8 months.
Zammit is the daughter of a canvasser of Malta’s Transport Minister Ian Borg. Borg distanced himself from the scandal and said that Transport Malta was an autonomous entity that took decisions, and also shouldered the responsibility for its actions, independently.
In her letter, Zammit praised herself for the work she carried out at Malta’s transport authority. She also claimed that she didn’t charge Transport Malta fees for her overtime work.
Also in her letter, Zammit says she wasn’t personally involved in politics. Following Malta’s general election of 2017, Zammit congratulated her “daddy” for “all the work” he put in to help get Minister Borg elected. She also congratulated the transport minister for being elected “with the highest number of votes after the Prime Minister”. She ended her post with the ruling Labour Party’s slogan “#laqwazmien” (the best of times).
When Zammit’s contracts were exposed, junior lawyers in Malta were up in arms as their starting salaries as lawyers were nowhere near the amount Zammit was raking in from taxpayer money.
The Lens received a full copy of her letter of resignation. Dr Zammit’s contact details have been cropped out of the picture below for privacy reasons.
The Lens 