1. Joseph Muscat was the leader of the opposition from October 2008 to March 2013.
68 Facts About Joseph Muscat
1. 2.
Joseph Muscat identifies as a progressive and liberal politician, with pro-business leanings, and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies.
3.
Joseph Muscat succeeded Alfred Sant as party leader in June 2008.
4.
Joseph Muscat rebranded the Labour Party, which embraced an increasingly socially liberal and centrist position.
5.
Joseph Muscat's premiership was marked for pulling together a national consensus for economic growth, based on a restructured Maltese economy.
6.
Joseph Muscat's administration led to large-scale changes to welfare and civil liberties, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage in July 2017 and the leagalisation of medical cannabis in March 2018.
7.
Joseph Muscat presided over the rise of the Labour Party and its dominance in Maltese politics, and the relative decline of the Nationalist Party.
8.
Joseph Muscat has been criticised by figures on both the left and right, and has been accused of political opportunism, broken promises on meritocracy and the environment, as well as corruption allegations.
9.
On 1 December 2019, under pressure from the 2019 street protests calling for his resignation in relation to the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Joseph Muscat announced his resignation, and stepped down on 13 January 2020.
10.
Joseph Muscat is the only leader of a Maltese political party, to have won all the elections he contested, ten in a row, both as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister, between 2009 and 2019, defeating three leaders of the Nationalist Party - Lawrence Gonzi, Simon Busuttil and Adrian Delia.
11.
Joseph Muscat was born on 22 January 1974, in Pieta, Malta, to a Burmarrad family.
12.
Joseph Muscat is married to Michelle Joseph Muscat and they are the parents of twins.
13.
Joseph Muscat attended the Government Primary School in St Paul's Bay, Stella Maris and St Aloysius' College.
14.
Joseph Muscat graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce in Management and Public Policy, a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in European Studies.
15.
Joseph Muscat was as a member of the youth section of the Labour Party, the Labour Youth Forum where he served as financial secretary and acting chairperson.
16.
Joseph Muscat later served as education secretary in the central administration of the party and chairman of its annual general conference.
17.
Joseph Muscat worked as a journalist with the party's radio station, Super One Radio.
18.
Joseph Muscat later took on a similar role at the Labour Party's Super One Television, chaired by Alfred Mifsud, becoming assistant head of news in 1996.
19.
Joseph Muscat wrote a regular column in L-Orizzont, a Maltese-language newspaper published by the General Workers' Union, as well as its sister Sunday weekly It-Torca; he was a regular contributor to the independent newspaper The Times of Malta.
20.
In 2003, Joseph Muscat was nominated to a working group led by George Vella and Evarist Bartolo on the Labour Party's policies on the European Union.
21.
At this General Conference, Joseph Muscat was approved as a candidate for member of the European Parliament.
22.
Joseph Muscat was the Labour Party candidate who received the most first-preference votes.
23.
Joseph Muscat was a member of a number of delegations for relations with Belarus and with the countries of south-east Europe.
24.
Joseph Muscat formed part of a team responsible for a report on the roaming mobile phone bills and sale of banks.
25.
Joseph Muscat resigned his seat in the European Parliament in 2008 to take up a seat in the Maltese Parliament, and the role of Leader of the Opposition.
26.
On 24 March 2008 Joseph Muscat announced his candidacy for the post of party leader, to replace Alfred Sant, who had resigned after a third consecutive defeat for the Party in the March 2008 general election and a heavy defeat in the EU referendum in March 2003.
27.
Joseph Muscat was just three votes short of winning the contest outright, obtaining 435 of the 874 valid votes cast, three fewer than the 438 needed.
28.
Joseph Muscat garnered 49.8 per cent of valid votes cast while the combined number of votes of the other contestants was 50.2 per cent.
29.
On taking up the Leadership post, Joseph Muscat introduced a number of changes to the Party, notably the change of official name and party emblem.
30.
One month later Joseph Muscat said that on a personal basis, he was going to campaigning for the introduction of divorce in Malta.
31.
Joseph Muscat said Lawrence Gonzi had officially lost his majority.
32.
Joseph Muscat contested Malta's general elections for the first time in March 2013.
33.
Joseph Muscat was elected on District 2 on the first count, with 13,968 votes and on District 4 again on the first count with 12,202 votes.
34.
Joseph Muscat's administration led to large-scale changes to welfare with the introduction of social benefit tapering policies, and increases in minimum wage.
35.
Joseph Muscat insisted that these results were delivered by his government as a team.
36.
Joseph Muscat admitted that his first administration had its challenges, namely the environment and good governance.
37.
On 7 April 2014, Joseph Muscat suffered from temporary blindness caused by ultraviolet radiation, probably related to burns to his cornea.
38.
In 2017 journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia alleged that Joseph Muscat's wife held a third company in Panama named Egrant.
39.
Joseph Muscat insisted that truth was on his side, and that he wanted to protect Malta from uncertainty, and called a general election.
40.
Joseph Muscat defined the Egrant allegations as an "undisputed and elaborate" attempt at a political frame up.
41.
Joseph Muscat stressed the record economic growth and employment levels, and the turnaround in the country's finances from deficit to surplus.
42.
Dr Joseph Muscat received 14,674 first count votes on the 2nd district and 12,886 first count votes on the 5th District.
43.
On 3 February 2017, Joseph Muscat hosted in Valletta an informal summit for all 28 EU heads of State or government which discussed irregular migration from Libya and the preparations for the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaties.
44.
Joseph Muscat is the Maltese politician who garnered the highest number of votes in a General Election.
45.
Joseph Muscat promised to "leave no stone unturned" in the subsequent investigation.
46.
On 5 December 2017, only fifty days after the car bomb, three men - brothers, George and Alfred Degiorgio, and Vincent Joseph Muscat - were charged with the murder of Caruana Galizia.
47.
In February 2021 Vincent Joseph Muscat was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty.
48.
Joseph Muscat faced accusations of failing to take action against two close aides: Keith Schembri, his chief of staff, and Konrad Mizzi, tourism and formerly energy minister, whose business and underworld links had been subject to judiciary and administrative investigations.
49.
Around the 2019 European elections, Joseph Muscat was touted for an EU job, possibly as successor to Donald Tusk as head of the European Council.
50.
In late November 2019, Joseph Muscat's premiership was rocked by the arrest of prominent businessman Yorgen Fenech, in connection with the Caruana Galizia's bomb attack, and the implication of Joseph Muscat's chief of staff Keith Schembri.
51.
On 25 November 2019, after protestors had called for him to resign, Joseph Muscat autonomously decided to grant presidential pardon to Melvin Theuma, considered the middleman between the executors of Caruana Galizia's murder, and the masterminds, on condition that he could link the person suspected of commissioning the murder of Caruana Galizia to those who carried out the killing, as well as those who helped provide the explosive device used.
52.
Joseph Muscat reminded that he had promised justice in the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder.
53.
In December 2019 Joseph Muscat had a strictly private meeting with Pope Francis.
54.
Joseph Muscat gave his final speech as Prime Minister on 10 January 2020.
55.
In September 2020, financial crime blogger Kenneth Rijock, a disbarred attorney who, in 1990, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy of fraud and one count of racketeering at a federal court in Florida, for which he received a 24-month prison sentence, alleged that Joseph Muscat aimed to move to Dubai and take up a post as CEO of a Maltese-owned Dubai catering company which had just been awarded a lucrative public tender in Malta.
56.
Rijock claimed Joseph Muscat could be among the targets of an FBI special money laundering investigation focusing on Malta, and as there is no extradition treaty between the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
57.
Joseph Muscat denied these plans and did to move to Dubai.
58.
In October 2020, Joseph Muscat resigned as Member of the Maltese Parliament with a 90-second speech.
59.
In December 2020, Joseph Muscat testified in the public inquiry into Caruana Galizia's murder; he confirmed close contacts and "friendship" with Yorgen Fenech, while denying having any indication on the murder plot.
60.
Joseph Muscat explained that the moment this assassination took place, he knew that his political life would be marked by it as much as all the things he tried doing for Malta.
61.
The report unequivocally stated that Joseph Muscat was in no way implicated in the murder.
62.
Joseph Muscat insisted that there was impunity in cases before his term in office, where high profile crimes were committed but nobody was ever prosecuted.
63.
Under normal circumstances the Police Commissioner would have gone to the Duty Magistrate, a Magistrate different from Magistrate Vella, and Dr Joseph Muscat would have had his rights protected.
64.
Subsequently Magistrate Vella instructed the Police Commissioner to withhold action against Dr Joseph Muscat, thereby preventing Dr Joseph Muscat from exercising his right to a response.
65.
On 16 November 2021 Dr Joseph Muscat himself asked Magistrate Vella for a meeting where he could answer all questions about the Times of Malta article, showing that it was not true at all that these advisory work contained anything irregular, presenting documents related to the work he had done and pointing out persons who could corroborate what he was saying.
66.
When Dr Joseph Muscat's residence was searched, Dr Robert Aquilina who at that time was the President of Repubblika, knew about it beforehand, and was outside watching what was going on.
67.
In Court Dr Joseph Muscat maintained that all this shows a certain prejudice from close relatives of the Magistrate Vella and "in this context it is natural that people will start to find difficulty perceiving objective impartiality in the Magistrate's work".
68.
Joseph Muscat reminded that the Constitutional Court had accepted a request that had been made for the removal of Deputy Commissioner Silvio Valletta from the investigation into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia because his wife was a Minister in the government led by him.