John Dalli testified in court yesterday morning in the case against Silvio Zammit, his former political aide and canvasser. The magistrate told him that he had the right not to answer questions if he felt that by answering he would incriminate himself. Dalli replied that he was there to answer all questions. And that begged the most obvious question of all, but it wasn’t asked.
If he had nothing to hide, and if he was not afraid of answering prosecution questions, then why did he hold out in Brussels until just before Labour won the general election, and he presumably then felt himself safe enough to return, with an array of certificates from a psychologist saying that he had “psycho-social” difficulties and could not fly?
Instead, the prosecution asked, by way of an opening gambit: “Who is John Dalli today?” It is difficult to see what the point of that question could possibly have been, but Dalli replied, in the way of God appearing to Moses in a burning bush, “I am who I am”: “John Dalli is John Dalli.” When people talk about themselves in the third person, it is invariably a warning sign. I am not quite sure about what, but I do know that it’s a red alert, and that the only people I’ve known to do it are those with what Dalli’s erstwhile Belgian psychologist might have called psycho-social difficulties.
In any case, Dalli saw fit to tell the court what he has been telling journalists for some time now: “I still consider myself to be an EU commissioner.” This, too, is a red flag, like talking about oneself in the third person. What we consider ourselves to be is irrelevant. It is what we are that matters in fact and at law. It is not up to John Dalli to consider himself an EU Commissioner. It is up to the EU Commission to consider him one, and they don’t. They gave him half an hour to clear his desk and resign, failing which they would have unceremoniously sacked him and he would have lost his pension rights, quite apart from the compounded disgrace.
Dalli also told the court that he never discussed money with Silvio Zammit – no, not even the price of mqaret or the snus Zammit reportedly sold to Swedes working in Malta from beneath his bar counter. He was under oath, so the less cynical among us will have to believe him. He also said that Zammit was just another one of his electoral canvassers, but the prosecution failed to pounce on the obvious: that EU Commissioners are out of the electoral race and do not need canvassers. Also, it has emerged from other evidence that Dalli held some of his meetings, while he was in Malta, at an outdoor table at Peppi’s Kiosk on the Sliema promenade. Why would he have done that? It’s not the sort of place you would expect to find an EU Commissioner holding meetings. The only reason can have been his friendship with the owner, Silvio Zammit. Also, there is a photograph in existence, which has been published online, which shows John Dalli, while EU Commissioner and so not in need of electoral canvassers, on holiday in Italy with Silvio Zammit and with the third man in this unsavoury debacle, Iosif Galea, a man so close to Silvio Zammit that for a time Zammit used to personally deliver a hot lunch for him most days at his office at the Lotteries and Gaming Authority.
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Our prime minister has said that Malta needn’t continue to hitch its wagon to the European convoy and instead go global in the wider world. By this he didn’t mean the world’s democracies but the world’s choicest dictators and oppressors. Mintoff lived to see most of his friends and allies shot by firing squad or otherwise meeting an ugly end or exile at the hands of the people they had oppressed. The only exceptions were the psychopaths in charge of North Korea and the communist leaders of China. But the experience of watching his newfound ‘global’ allies go down like skittles seems to be happening to Muscat in record time. First Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and now Ali Zidan in Libya have been forced out of office and into exile. Yanukovych fled to that other friend of Malta, Russia, and Zidan fled to heaven knows where, but we do know that he stopped in Malta for a couple of hours on his way out. The official line is that this was a refuelling stop. But many people suspect he picked up a Schengen visa in the form of a Maltese identity card as a prospective applicant for Maltese citizenship, if it wasn’t actually a Maltese passport straight off the bat. Journalists won’t get any joy from the Maltese government, but if this did indeed happen, then we can expect to find out about it sooner or later from the overseas press.
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