Malta has experienced a decline in retail sales over five of the last six months, and while some of this can doubtless be attributed to changing patterns of shopping due to increased reliance on internet purchases, the fact remains that it contrasts with the situation in the rest of the European Union, which has over the same period seen an average increase in retail sales of 1.6%. Unfortunately, the decline in retail sales is of a pattern with a rise in unemployment and falling imports and exports. The government has hinged its hopes on slashed utilities bills and revenue through the sale of Maltese citizenship, but that is unlikely to be the right course of action to make the good times roll.
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Marie Louise Coleiro Preca has said to the newspapers that she will have no problem signing the civil unions bill, which will give same-sex couples the right to adopt children (as a couple) into law, when she is the head of state. I glad she said this, because it puts paid once and for all to the assertion that the prime minister felt he had to get her out of parliament because she was kicking up a stink about that precise bill. That bit of spin, designed to mask the real reason why Mrs Coleiro Preca’s seat in parliament is being freed up – and we have yet to discover what that reason is – never made sense to me. The prime minister has a nine-seat majority in parliament. Even if Mrs Coleiro Preca were to behave far worse than Franco Debono and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando put together (and I can’t see any woman behaving so dreadfully or crassly), the bill would be home and dry with perfect ease.
So no, there is another reason why Mrs Coleiro Preca has been removed from the political equation, not just in this government but also the upcoming general election and campaigning for Labour in general. I for one don’t think it has anything at all with the woman herself. Even if she is proving an inconvenience as social policy minister, a cabinet reshuffle would have sorted that out and she could have been allowed to stay on in parliament. I can’t shake off the feeling that this has nothing to do with Mrs Coleiro Preca herself, but with the need to free up a seat in parliament after others failed to oblige by taking up the offer of five years at San Anton Palace.
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Senior diplomats from Russia, Ukraine, France, the United Kingdom and the United States are gathering in Paris to try to find a solution to the deepening crisis in Ukraine. Meanwhile, I scour the newspapers in search of a statement from the government of Malta, outlining its position, and find nothing. This is rather strange, because the last trip the then president, Viktor Yanukovych, was supposed to make abroad, before he fled to Russia as a fugitive amid chaotic and increasingly savage demonstrations against his rule, was to Malta. There was to have been a full-blown state visit late last November, in which Yanukovych would have been decorated with Malta’s highest honour, the Gieh ir-Repubblika. This was after a high-level Maltese delegation, composed of our prime minister, our foreign minister and Edward Zammit Lewis, visited Yanukovych in Ukraine in September. Yet now there is silence from our government, where there should be a clear statement about where it stands on the matter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Yanukovych’s fugitive status. Will Muscat’s office tell us that the people of Ukraine have spoken? Or will it tell us that it would be “prudent” to say nothing and sit on the fence for the next, say, five years?
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There is outrage against Henley & Partners’ claim on 80% of the commission due to estate agents who broker deals on property sales to those who buy Maltese citizenship. This is not because people feel any sort of need to fight the cause of real-estate agents – they don’t – but because this is yet another indication of just how far Henley & Partners has seized control of the situation and is permitted by the government to behave as it pleases, seemingly with impunity.
The company’s response to this anger about the commission is that it is not taking 80%, but that only 20% will in fact go to Henley Estates. The other 60%, it said in a statement to the press, will go to the company which introduced the client to the estate agent in the first place, and that company is...Henley & Partners. So in effect, Henley will still be creaming off 80% no matter how it slices its explanations: 20% to Henley Estates and 60% to Henley & Partners. The company’s excuse that these are in fact two separate companies simply does not wash. Yes, of course they are two separate companies, and they are registered as such, but it is the shareholding that counts. What irritates most is the way such disingenuous statements are reported unquestioningly, and what irritates almost as much is the way Henley & Partners behave towards Malta and the Maltese as though we are just another third-world nation, oil state kleptocracy or Caribbean banana republic. Well, perhaps we are now one, disguised as an EU member state.
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