Over two weeks after John Demanuele made allegations of vote-rigging attempts involving a number of countries including Malta just days before the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, no action has yet been taken.
During a discussion programme on a local TV station, Demanuele, the vice-chairman of the Maltasong Board, revealed that persons representing Georgia had a meeting with the Maltese delegation in Helsinki, where the Eurovision was held, in what he claimed to be an attempt to agree on how many points the two countries will be awarding to each other.
During the same programme a week later, Robert Abela, the Maltasong Board chairman, confirmed the incident but said that the account given by his second in command may have been slightly mistaken
“Can you give us points?”
But when reacting to the allegations during the same programme, three former Maltasong Board chairpersons, Gejtu Abela, Charlo Bonnici and Grace Borg, insisted that such “dealing” and negotiations for votes before Eurovision contests have been going on for years. “This is nothing new. These things have been going on since the Eurovision contest started” said Bonnici, now a top government official.
John Demanuele explained: “I can say today… Georgia, the new comers in this year’s Eurovision, we had a meeting, and they told us ‘we are new here… how many points are you going to give us? Can you give us points?’ We replied, ‘we cannot give you points because we use televoting’. They replied, ‘so we won’t give you any points.’ Full stop”.Later on, he explained that the conversation took place during an informal dinner between the representatives of the two countries. "They asked us, 'can you promise us any votes?' We answered 'no, we have televoting'... now it could have either been an innocent question, or else he was testing the waters".
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