It’s been a few years now since we’ve had a right and proper silly season. That’s the media term for those torpid weeks when parliament shuts down for the summer, politicians leave us in peace and the Courts of Justice deal only with arraignments, while everyone else is either at the beach or wishing they were, while the heat slowly erodes our soul – but newspapers and news bulletins still have to be filled somehow. The result is odd and often quite pointless stories, or rather too much focus on things or people which are not that significant at all, or play no part in the running of the country.
For the last few years, the reverse seems to have happened, with no change in pace and sometimes even things really hotting up in line with the weather. Much of that is due to changed times and politicians’ understanding at last that they can’t switch off the system for the summer, though maybe just for a couple of weeks in August. Now, they want to be in the news all the time, too – but only with the positive stuff. So they continue to give us their ‘news’ while we continue to find out the things they’d rather we all did not know.
The man of the moment, though not in the best way, is the Minister for the Economy, Chris Cardona. He’d long been hanging out at the Stable bar in Valletta, even before he was appointed to the cabinet, so his defensive reaction when the story finally broke was a little odd, to say the least. No doubt there are people about – he is one of them, as he told me himself – who think there is absolutely nothing wrong with a cabinet minister being in a bar at 5pm on a workday when he’s got an economy to run. That would be bad enough, but then this is not a smart bar where you’d stop off for an aperitif after work, London- or Milan-style, among high-fliers and civilised people. This is a hang-out of a certain kind, a tiny one, and I had best stop there because the owner will begin neighing in protest again.
You just have to wonder what is going on with the Minister for the Economy. Yesterday, the news broke – and was all over the press in Malta and Italy – that the Italian police had cracked down massively on the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta’s money-laundering operations, and that six Italians living in Malta had been arrested for extradition to Italy. It turns out that they are linked to internet gaming companies registered and run out of Malta. Chris Cardona is the cabinet minister responsible for internet gaming and casinos, so you would have expected him to call a press conference immediately, or at the very least issue a statement to the press, but no. He didn’t. Instead, his head of secretariat, Mario Azzopardi – what this government calls ‘chief of staff’ – spent the better part of the day mass-messaging people on his contacts list, urging them to turn up to a ‘festa familja’ organised by ‘the friends of Chris Cardona’, to be held tomorrow. Mario Azzopardi doesn’t know any better. His business is owning and running cheap boutiques outside Malta’s main shopping zones. He hasn’t a clue what is required of a cabinet minister’s head of secretariat, still less what is required of his boss the minister. They have carried on in government just as they did in Opposition, with the main difference being that they can now put lots of friends, relations and cronies on the public payroll at the Ministry in a ‘position of trust’.
The Malta Gaming Authority, which is in Cardona’s portfolio, has issued a brief statement, but it is not enough. It is clear from the Italian crackdown – has long been clear, in fact, and much discussed in that country – that Italy’s various crime syndicates (the Mafia, the Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta) are moving their online gaming operations out of Italy and into Malta in an attempt at evading increasing scrutiny and tighter anti-money-laundering regulation in Italy. It has also been evident for a few years now that these crime syndicates are using internet gaming as the ideal means for laundering the profits of crime, mainly cocaine-trafficking.
Yet Malta seems merely delighted to have one internet gaming company after another registered in Malta without due scrutiny. It makes you wonder about the sort of due diligence and background checks being carried out on those who are sold Maltese citizenship.
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