I am sick to the back teeth of reading inane and ridiculous exchanges on ‘closed’ Facebook groups (I hate to break it to you, folks, but those groups are about as private as all the screenshots of your comments doing the rounds) about why the Nationalist Party lost the general election. The Nationalist Party didn’t “lose” the general election. Joseph Muscat won it. And he didn’t win it because he gave out jobs, or contracts, or allowed a free for all in planning permits, or this or that or the other. All of that is secondary.
The real, singular and primary reason that Muscat won the general election – and make no mistake that the cabal won it for themselves – is institutional failure. Had the police arrested and interrogated Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, as they were and still are in duty bound to do following the investigations of the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, leading to indictment on charges of money-laundering, then there would have been no 36,000-vote majority. There would have been no majority at all. There wouldn’t even have been a general election – not now, anyway, but in next year at the 11th hour, extending the time to the max to scrounge every last vote. And they would still have lost.
So please stop all this dumb talk. It just makes those sitting around rabbiting about reasons for the loss look plain stupid. It means that not even key people in the Nationalist Party, and their supporters, understood the full gravity of the manner in which Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi escaped justice and due process. How, then, do they expect others to understand it? Here it is in one simple line: Labour won the general election because the politically-controlled police failed to arrest, interrogate and arraign Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi.
Instead, they arrested, interrogated and arraigned a Kentucky Fried Chicken employee who stole thousands from the till over a few years. Instead of charging him with plain theft, they charged him with money-laundering (because he deposited the money in his local bank), and he went down for four years and had all his assets seized. Yes, that’s right, the lowly man behind the counter at KFC has been imprisoned for four years for “money laundering” while those who control the police remain unmolested and free to molest others using all the powers vested in them by their roles in government.
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Adrian Delia has given an interview to this newspaper in which he says, in all seriousness: “If I become leader of the Nationalist Party, I will sell all my business shares and partnerships.” He will not be involved in “any commercial activity”, he said. Do I have to be the one to point it out? If he is elected party leader, he will have no choice but to drop all commercial activity. The Nationalist Party leader is not “the Nationalist Party leader” but the Leader of the Opposition, a Constitutional role like that of the Prime Minister. Just as the Prime Minister cannot be engaged in any commercial activity (let’s draw a discreet silence over that for the purpose of this particular column), nor can the Opposition leader. This false boasting about things he will have to do anyway is incredibly annoying.
It’s pointless saying he will sell his business shares and partnerships, too, because what really matters is to whom he plans to sell them. Because he is certain to have a plan already and that means the persons to whom he intends to sell them are known to him already. Selling his shares and giving up his partnership (for a consideration) are not enough. In the interests of transparency, the public has got to know that he will have no kind of relationship with those companies or with the law firm thereafter. It is the easiest thing to ‘sell’ your shares or give up your partnership only to carry on regardless. Sadly, lack of transparency in these matters in Malta makes it difficult for the concerned public or the media to find out what is really going on. If Dr Delia does get to be leader of the Opposition (highlighting the desperate position of the Nationalist Party, that it had to rely on somebody who walked in off the street, literally) then the only way he is going to become Prime Minister in 2022 is if people have had it up to here with corruption and greed. They’re not going to vote for other greedy people, because then they might as well stick with the devil they know.
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