By Neville Borg
Adrian Delia is vying to become leader of the Nationalist Party for a second time. Read a profile about his rival Alex Borg here. Adrian Delia, the man who once pitched himself as a fresh-faced outsider to politics, is vying for a second stint at the helm of the party after serving as leader for a turbulent three-year spell between 2017 and 2020. The 55-year-old lawyer was the first person to put his name forward in the PN leadership race after spending much of the last half decade mending bridges burnt during his leadership, spearheading a successful campaign to reclaim three public hospitals from a fraudulent concession and reinventing himself as a fierce campaigner. From backpacker to lawyer Raised a stone’s throw away from Birkirkara’s oldest parish, known as il-Knisja l-Qadima, Delia caught the travel bug as a young man, recently recounting tales of his misspent youth backpacking through trails in Central America and Africa during an interview with a popular local podcaster. He graduated as a lawyer in 1993, by which time he had already taken his first professional steps at the now-defunct Mid-Med Bank. Delia would revisit his banking roots years later, becoming director at Erste Bank, an Austrian bank which left the island in 2014. But Delia’s professional career really took off after he founded his law firm, Aequitas Legal, together with former PN candidate Georg Sapiano, in the late 1990s. The firm’s finances would later come under scrutiny, after records revealed that it had received over €333,000 in payments from PN governments between 2005 and 2012. Football and match-fixing Delia’s roots in Birkirkara rose to the fore again when, in 2015, he was appointed president of the town’s football club. His tenure was not without incident. In 2016, the club’s Croatian goalkeeper, Miroslav Kopric, was arrested by police after club officials reported what they believed to be instances of match-fixing. Kopric took to Serbian media to rebut the accusations, claiming that he had been “kidnapped” by Delia and six others, who took him to a garage to try to elicit a confession. Although the police probe against Kopric did not yield any charges, Delia was seen as one of the faces of the crusade against match-fixing in local football, finding an unlikely ally in (then football association vice-president and now transport minister) Chris Bonett, who at the time was preparing to take up a role as UEFA’s integrity officer. Political unknown All the while, Delia’s political career had yet to begin. Despite having dabbled with party politics at a young age, joining the PN’s youth wing as a teen, Delia was conspicuously absent from politics throughout much of his adult life. He reportedly turned down approaches to contest the election on a PN ticket in both 2013 and 2017, opting to dedicate his time to his growing legal office and young family instead. The PN’s catastrophic 2017 election result and the subsequent resignation of party leader Simon Busuttil changed things. At the starting gun in the race to become Busuttil’s successor, a motley crew of candidates stepped up, from the steady party hands of Chris Said and Alex Perici Calascione, to the maverick businessman and former MP Frank Portelli. The first among them to submit his candidacy, however, was none other than little-known outsider Adrian Delia. ‘Biċċa blogger’ Pitching himself as a disruptor, Delia called for “a new way” of doing politics, promising a clean break from the PN “establishment” which had delivered consecutive electoral drubbings. Foremost in his sights was Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had featured in a 2013 electoral defeat report outlining reasons behind the party’s heavy defeat. Delia’s leadership campaign was characterised by a series of scathing attacks upon each other. Caruana Galizia accused Delia of involvement in a series of illicit activities, most notably linking him to a Soho prostitution ring and claiming he was the custodian of an offshore account used to launder proceedings from the racket. Delia, who denied the claims, promptly responded by filing a series of libel suits against Caruana Galizia. Things would come to a head in early September 2017 when, during a fiery speech at a campaign rally, he described Caruana Galizia as a “biċċa blogger”, a phrase that would come to haunt him in years to come. Investigations into Caruana Galizia’s claims have since hit a brick wall, despite a report by Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit finding that a bank account allegedly owned by Delia in Jersey “may have been used for money laundering”. Delia takes office While Delia has repeatedly refuted the claims, the allegations were enough for the PN’s administrative council (as well as outgoing leader Simon Busuttil) to urge Delia to drop out of the leadership race at the time. Delia not only stayed in the race but comfortably defeated rival Chris Said, winning 53 per cent of party members’ votes and becoming the first PN leader elected from outside parliament. Just weeks into his tenure, Caruana Galizia was killed. The assassination and the well-documented antipathy between Caruana Galizia and Delia dashed any hopes he may have had of uniting a fractured party and turning over a new leaf. Instead, divisions widened, with several MPs who had opposed Delia’s election refusing to toe the party line. Delia’s own efforts to impose his will and instil discipline frequently fell flat. In 2018, Delia attempted to suspend Busuttil from the party’s parliamentary group, after an attorney general’s report found that claims linking the secret offshore company Egrant to Joseph Muscat and his wife were unfounded. Delia would later describe the incident as a mistake, but not before it had driven a wedge between Busuttil’s allies in the party and the Delia camp. Struggles at the polls Outside of the infighting and internal squabbles, the party’s poor performances at the polls continued to pile pressure on Delia. Following a string of poor polls, PN lost the 2019 MEP elections by over 42,000 votes, the largest gap in Malta’s electoral history, giving up the party’s third EP seat in the process. By that point, Delia’s private life had also come under scrutiny, after court leaks revealed that he had been accused of domestic violence by his then-wife during separation proceedings. As Delia’s harshest critics pored over the leaks with barely concealed glee, calls for his resignation grew. 17 blue heroes The calls reached their climax in the summer of 2020 when a group of 17 MPs and MEPs, infamously dubbed the “17 blue heroes”, took matters into their own hands, triggering a process to overthrow Delia as opposition leader and replace him with MP Therese Comodini Cachia. The straw that had broken the camel’s back were reports, just days earlier, of a string of WhatsApp messages exchanged between Delia and 17 Black owner Yorgen Fenech. Although President George Vella turned down the MPs’ request for Delia’s removal, the writing was on the wall. Delia lost a vote of no confidence among his MPs, eventually taking the matter to the party members and calling for a fresh leadership election. Delia’s death by a thousand cuts was complete that October when he lost the election to Bernard Grech, the man he now hopes to replace. The Vitals victory Instead of fading into political obscurity after the defeat, Delia instantly pledged fealty to the party’s new leader. Always a skilled communicator, he quickly reinvented himself as one of the party’s strongest voices on a range of issues, from transportation to healthcare. His crowning moment came in March 2023 when the courts annulled a “fraudulent” deal to privatise three public hospitals. It was the culmination of a five-year legal battle for Delia, who had initiated proceedings in 2018 and fought the case almost single-handedly. The triumph brought praise from even his harshest critics, a scenario deemed unthinkable just a few years earlier. But by this point, his critics had become a rarer breed, with Delia having successfully mended bridges with many of his most vocal detractors. Even a spectacular, long-standing feud with former MP Jason Azzopardi (who once described him as a Labour “Trojan horse”) came to an end, after the latter withdrew claims that Delia had exchanged hundreds of messages with Yorgen Fenech. Whether Delia has done enough to win over the party members who ousted him five years ago remains to be seen. A recent poll among PN members placed him in second place, behind Alex Borg, the only other candidate to have declared his intention to run. Delia is currently in a relationship with Cynthia Galea and has six children.