Julia Farrugia Portelli

Julia Farrugia is a Maltese politician, currently serving as Minister for Inclusion and Social Wellbeing.^[1]

She was elected from the 5th district at the 2017 general election^[2] on the Labour Party ticket, and served as Parliamentary Secretary for Reforms, Citizenship and Simplification of Administrative Processes at the Office of the Prime Minister between 9 June 2017^[3] and 13 January 2020. As Parliamentary Secretary she was involved with reforms including: Human Trafficking, Constitutional Reform and Equal Representation in Parliament. She served as a member of the Public Accounts Committee of the Maltese Parliament.^[4]

In 2018, Farrugia was awarded the ‘Impactful Politics’ Awards from JCI Malta.^[5] She has successfully implemented the VOTE16 reform, where Malta is now one of two European Union Member states that have lowered their voting age to 16.^[6] With the election of Robert Abela as Prime Minister of Malta, Farrugia was appointed Minister for Tourism and Consumer Protection on 15 January 2020.^[7] Farrugia is a former journalist and anchor of a number of current affairs and investigative journalism programmes. She was also the first female editor of a Maltese language newspaper, Illum.^[8]

In 2020, The Commissioner for Standards in Public Life found that Farrugia may have given an improper advantage to a private firm selling citizenship by investment schemes. Minister Farrugia, who at the time was a Parliamentary Secretary with responsibility for these schemes, appeared in all three videos together with officials from the government agencies that administer the schemes and representatives of the law firm itself. All three videos were shot in Castille. The Commissioner held that “there is a fine line between promoting a Government scheme and giving preferential treatment to a particular agent. In my opinion, this line has been crossed in the case under consideration.” ^[9]