The medical visas scandal continues to grow, with threats made against the Libyan go-between who says he paid tens of thousands of euros to Neville Gafà, a former shop assistant placed on the public sector payroll in March 2013 as a ‘person of trust’ working closely with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and with (former) Health Minister Konrad Mizzi.

Gafà has denied he took the money but he has not denied receiving it, which is different. He may have received it on behalf of others and simply passed it on, which is also a crime. The Viber messages which the go-between published are quite clear: he is chasing Gafà for visas or for the return of the money, and Gafà is fobbing him off.

Now we hear that the go-between has received a death threat against his children over the telephone at night, and that he has been held and interrogated by the police, who tried to intimidate him into handing over any evidence he has, “including photographs and videos”. Meanwhile, Gafàis still on the public sector payroll, even though he can be dismissed instantly because he is not a civil servant; Konrad Mizzi is as elusive and slippery as ever, and the Prime Minister has evaded, rather than avoided, all questions about the matter.

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We still don’t know what on earth is happening with Konrad Mizzi’s wife, another politically exposed person with a money-hiding vehicle in New Zealand. She clearly has no intention of returning to Malta; it was as clear as day to all but the terminally blind that when she packed up and left in the summer of 2013 she did so for good. The ‘job’ was just a piece of fiction to make it possible for her to leave the island she hated at the expense of the taxpayers she couldn’t stand.

None of us cares whether she returns or not, except for the fact that her failure to return is the greatest evidence possible that she was never in China to do a job for the Maltese government. Her contract was up a week ago, but with their usual brass-necked nerve, the government has refused to say whether they have renewed it or not. That slippery eel of a husband of hers, and he who replaced him as deputy leader of that outfit we call the Labour Party, have got to be pinned down on this. All a journalist has got to do is wait for a few hours in Sappers Street, Valletta, and the Minister for the Economy will eventually roll up for a drink or 10 with his lowlife chief of staff.

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The Prime Minister and his two henchmen, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, flew to Singapore more than a month ago to launch, like the Walmart end-of-line-bin version of Helen of Troy, the asbestos-laden antique – or should we say, in line with current usage, ‘vintage’ – floating gas storage vessel, the Bumi Armada. But it’s still there, still in Singapore, and many journalists and others have been monitoring its lack of progress – these things are all possible online – with rapidly blackening humour.

At one point, the vessel’s signalling system was actually switched off so that the Bumi Armada was ‘hidden’ from all those of us who were checking in every day to see it still located in Singapore harbour and have a good laugh about it. Because let’s face it, you have got to laugh. The way this country has been taken for a ride by a bunch of crooks with a roadmap for crookery is just beyond belief. The only thing that’s missing in this twisted Montenegro-style scenario are the politicians who liaise with the Mafia and/or finance cocaine shipments into the country, and at this stage, quite frankly, nothing is going to surprise me (or any of you either, I imagine).

Now we are told that the umpteenth deadline, set for this month, will be missed yet again, and that it is unlikely anything is going to happen before December, if that. This means that almost four years into this government’s term of office, and with just one year to go until the general election, the power station that these creeps, who were liaising with a bunch of sleazy businessmen behind our backs even as they told us to vote for ‘meritocracy and transparency’, will still be nothing but wishful thinking. Back in February 2013, when they were gunning for our vote, Panama Jack Mizzi told us, in his best weird voice, that his roadmap to have the power station commissioned, up and running in just 24 months from the Labour Party’s election to government was “concrete, costed and doable”. All we know is that these louts dedicated far more time, energy and creativity to setting up their vehicles in Panama, New Zealand and the British Virgin Islands than they did to actually governing.

It is only the completely brainwashed who have by now failed to notice that the only aspects of governing and policy-making to which this government dedicates any time or attention at all are those from which money can be made on the side by a coterie of the corrupt and the businessmen they have corrupted. For, fascinatingly, we have now reached that stage in Maltese life where instead of having businessmen corrupting politicians, we have politicians who are corrupting businessmen. I have no doubt at all that it is the politicians and their henchmen who proposed the deals to the crooked businessmen, rather than the other way around. Yes, that’s how bad things are.

 

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