BARBARA DZIDZORNU ADAGBLENYA: THE MALTA FILM REBATES SCAM PULLS A FAST ONE IN LESS THAN 24 HOURS

by a Blog Reader

A couple of days ago, as soon as an article was published in this blog post about the Canadian mass media consulting firm Nordicity being staffed with grossly underqualified senior analysts, someone from Malta, possibly the Film Commissioner himself, referred the article to Nordicity. Whoever it was must have voiced our concern, that all three senior analysts had academic qualifications unbefitting of quantitative analyses. Nordicity is commissioned by the Maltese Ministry of Tourism to pen reports justifying the Ministry’s mega million budgets on media events. Within hours of our published article, Nordicity updated its website and changed its analyst Barbara Dzidzornu Adagblenya’s official title to “Senior Analyst.” It also tweaked her bio. Surely this fourth Senior Analyst had better academic credentials than the other three, but could she placate Johann Grech, the Film Commissioner, and Clayton Bartolo, the Minister of Tourism? The scam is increasingly skating on thin ice and the Maltese government’s reputation is intricately linked to Nordicity’s.

Pulling the Rabbit

In our article, we pointed out that the first senior analyst at Nordicity claimed a diploma in urban planning as her highest qualification. The second one’s specialisation was in Ovid’s poetry. The third one was a young Canadian crazy about the pronoun “they.” His specialisation, an MA degree, centred on critical disability, a fitting area for a gender-confused man. None of them specialised in quantitative analysis, vitally important to justify the Maltese government’s squandering of countless millions upon Hollywood’s movie moguls.

We wrote in two consecutive articles (click here and here) how the films rebate system was a scam. It originally picked up steam as a cover-up for an extra-marital affair where the finest hotels and restaurants were booked around the world at the taxpayer’s expense to impress the coy partner. But like a gambling whale who finally loses all bearings, the whole spending spree has now hit the stratosphere with a tax rebate of about €45 million to just one American movie-in-progress. This is in stark contrast to the previous €100 million paid to 53 films and television series by the Labour government over the last five years.

Days ago, Nordicity told Johann Grech, the Film Commissioner, in the presence of the Tourism Minister, that the €45 million euros in tax rebates were creating jobs in “catering [and] hair and make-up.” The Film Commissioner took the podium and instead said that the tax rebate scheme “is sustaining hospitals, pensions, and education.” How does pouring millions in Los Angeles, California, sustain the Maltese hospitals? Likewise, we can’t understand how it’s supporting the Maltese schools. Bartolo and Grech said that “Malta makes €3 for every €1 spent on rebates.” Absolutely not true. Not even close, as an article in our blogpost demonstrated.

But Minister Bartolo assures us that he has the Nordicity report to back up the claims. He does not. This is the reason why the report remains under lock and key at the Ministry because it fails to prove his point under close scrutiny. Bartolo should have said the truth, that the whole thing is a scam, second in size to the Stewart scam.

Enter into the fray a superwoman working at Nordicity’s Vancouver office, whose title was changed to Senior Analyst on the Nordicity website within 24 hours after the publication of our latest article about the scam. Her full name is Barbara Dzidzornu Adagblenya. She hails from Ghana. She makes a lot of claims about herself. We have aggregated her claims. The process left us breathless. Nordicity tells us that she graduated with three M.A. degrees within five short years, up to 2022. Nordicity further informs us that she “worked in… South Korea, Switzerland, and Canada.” According to information volunteered by herself, in the last five years, she held nine jobsat international companies. A woman like her the world has never seen.

Except that when we started digging further, we found that several of her jobs were fictitious, she never holds a job for long, and she never worked in South Korea. We will introduce her to you in detail later this week as part of our investigation into Malta’s second biggest financial scam, with the complicity of bogus consulting.