Out on €100,000 bail and risking a 10-year prison sentence, 50-year old Silvio Zammit pulls on his cigarette and looks out onto St Julian’s Bay from the terrace of his small restaurant, Peppi’s, on the northern coast of Malta.
He points to the stone walls that separate the sea from Sliema’s string of soulless residential buildings.
As a teenager, he tagged the walls with slogans in support of Malta’s former governing party.
“My life, my friends, my family are all in the Nationalist Party,” he tells EUobserver.
“We are friends and we share the same political views and ideology,” he says of John Dalli – a Nationalist Party politician and a former EU health commissioner who lost his job in a 2012 tobacco lobbying scandal.
Zammit is forbidden from speaking about the case directly because it is sub judice.
But recalling the years before the scandal, he says his personal life was bound up with his wife and sons and with local politics.
Nikolaj Nielsen