Former Nationalist Party MP Francis Zammit Dimech, who in this legislature was also named Acting President, has died after a long battle with cancer.
He was aged 70.
His death was announced by Nationalist Party Leader Bernard Grech.
Zammit Dimech was born in St Julian’s on 23 October, 1954. He was educated at St Aloysius College, the Junior College and the University of Malta, from where he graduated as a lawyer in 1979.
In 1969, Zammit Dimech had founded the Teens and Twenties Talent Trust, a youth movement meant to make full use of the talents of young people for the benefit of society as a whole.
Between 1978 and 1979, he was president of the University Students’ Council.
He contested all elections between 1981 and 2008 as a Nationalist Party candidate. He was elected for the first time in 1987 and remained an MP until 2013.
During this time, he served as parliamentary secretary for transport and communications between 1990 and 1992, Minister for Transport and Communications between 1992 and 1994, the Environment between 1994 and 1996, and Minister for Tourism and Culture between 2003 and 2008. He was also Foreign Minister for a few months towards the end of the Lawrence Gonzi 2008-2013 government.
Zammit Dimech served briefly as a Member of the European Parliament from 2017 till 2019.
In 2020, he was interim secretary general of the Nationalist Party. It was a tumultuous time for the party, as its then leader Adrian Delia was not being seen kindly by some Nationalist MPs.
In an interview he had given to this newspaper at the time, Zammit Dimech had spoken about how the party could reconnect with the people.
“The fact that we are placing a strong emphasis on the outreach element of the party means that the PN is very conscious that it cannot simply conduct policy within its own structures, even if more than ever we are following a bottom-up approach which already helps in reflecting the people’s needs and what they call for,” he had said at the time.
Zammit Dimech had previously served as international secretary of the MZPN, vice-president of the Democratic Youth Community of Europe between 1981 and 1983 and president of MZPN in 1985.