Foreign Ministry probes media report on 1970s diplomat 'mole'

The Foreign Affairs Ministry is looking into media reports alleging that a former Maltese diplomat passed on confidential information to the British in 1971.

According to an article in l-Orizzont yesterday, the diplomat, which it named, passed on information about high-level meetings between the Maltese and Libyan governments 38 years ago, soon after the Labour Party won the general election.

He was said to have met an official from the British Embassy based in Tripoli and divulged information about a meeting held between then Maltese Deputy Prime Minister Anton Buttigieg and Libyan Prime Minister Abdessalam Jalloud.

The information was then reportedly passed on to the Commonwealth and Foreign Office in North Africa. According to the newspaper, the Maltese diplomat had told his British colleague that the two delegations discussed the possibility of Libya giving Malta funds.

Several attempts to contact the former diplomat were unsuccessful. A woman who answered the phone at home said that "he was not taking phone calls at the moment".

The former diplomat currently acts as a consultant to the Foreign Office on a specific task. When contacted for a reaction, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said they were establishing the facts of the matter and had already spoken to the former diplomat. However, the spokesman would not comment further.

Legal sources said the newspaper report was too vague to be able to say whether the former diplomat had committed any crime or not.

A lawyer said there were a number of sections in the law that could be applied to this sort of case, such as disclosing official secrets and divulging information obtained through a public role.

However, he insisted that it was too early to say, especially since such matters were very much a grey area, which also made it difficult to say whether the case was time barred.