Mark Camilleri has made some startling allegations concerning former Economy Minister Chris Cardona’s adventures with sex workers on the island and strip club owners involved in human trafficking in his new explosive book.

“One of Cardona’s most popular requests to sex workers was to lie down facing the floor butt naked, preferably with a dominant mistress pouring candle-wax over his body and stepping on his back with her stilettos. He liked to be whipped, spanked and play the good little boy while being dominated,” Camilleri writes in ‘A Rent Seeker’s Paradise’. 

“Cardona also befriended strip club owners whose clubs he visited, and some of these club owners also happened to be involved in importing African women to work in strip clubs in 2014. Some of these African women had been previously trafficked to Italy by the mafia and were then engaged by semi-legal brokerage agencies providing women to the sex industry all over Europe.”

The former minister and deputy labour party leader outright denied the claims when contacted by Lovin Malta, saying:

“This guy is mad. He should wake up early, get a cold shower and run to a therapist. These are surely his sexual desires and surely never been or are mine. Tell him to stop using drugs… it will help him out.”

Cardona said that he would not pursue a libel case, insisting that he “don’t have time to waste with imbeciles”.

Cardona’s questionable personal life while serving as a Cabinet member has been the focus of controversy for a number of years, particularly after Daphne Caruana Galizia alleged that Cardona had visited a brothel in Germany while on official business, something which he still denies till today.

“The poster boy of the lavish and uncontrolled sexual indulgence of the Muscat era was Chris Cardona, who was the Minister for the Economy and partied publicly not only on weekends, but also on weekdays, at work, abroad, openly and in front of everyone on a frequent and regular basis – the ‘work hard, party hard’ mentality– only that he didn’t actually work very hard,” Camilleri writes. 

“The Minister for the Economy wasn’t able to introduce one single new economic sector into Malta as the Blockchain Island dream ended up a disaster and the prospective marijuana industry in Malta never even took off in the first place.”

“One of his only testaments as Minister for the Economy was probably the mushrooming of illegal brothels all over the island disguised as massage parlours.”

Cardona, who stepped away from political life following the crisis that erupted in 2019 and 2020 after the arrest of Yorgen Fenech in connection with the assassination of Caruana Galizia, is still not far away from scandal and damning allegations. 

Beyond continued claims that Cardona was involved with the assassination plot and another plot a few years prior, the former minister is also facing claims of having been involved with an infamous HSBC heist. Worrying for Cardona is that the claims are coming direclty from key players like Vince Muscat, Alfred Degiorgio, George Degiorgio, and Melvin Theuma. 

Cardona has denied all the claims. He is among a host of high-profile witnesses who will be asked to testify in the trial against Fenech. 

What do you think of the claims?