After the Michael Farrugia/Albert Fenech debacle, there’s been more nonsense in Parliament. Joe Mizzi, who was Prime Minister Sant’s Minister Without Portfolio, produced with a flourish a copy of a list of yachts taken from the Malta Maritime Authority. He wished to draw the attention of the House, and consequently, of the nation, to the fact that a clerk had listed one boat with the words “something fishy” instead of putting down its name. “This yacht has been noted down as something fishy,” Joe Mizzi said. “I think (the clerk) realised that there was something fishy about it, and so I am going to place this list on the table of the House.”
When told that Something Fishy is the name of the boat, and not a comment made by a suspicious clerk, the ex Minister Without Portfolio said he was just joking – you know, being sarcastic. I’m surprised to find that deadpan delivery is an element of Maltese humour, because I hadn’t noticed. Maltese humour is obvious and crass, like Italian humour – the Fantozzi sort. You can hear Maltese humour clanging and banging all the way down the corridor; that’s how subtle it is. So I don’t think so. I think that Prime Minister Sant’s right-hand man at Castille, important enough to be a minister but not important enough to be given a portfolio, did something more in keeping with the Maltese mindset: he read those words and took them literally.
I suppose we should be grateful that he didn’t find any boats called Sexy Beast or Going Loco on that list. There would have been chaos in the House. If Alfred Sant gets to be prime minister again next year, I hope he installs this man at his side in the Auberge de Castille like he did last time. We should be endlessly amused.
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Joe Mizzi didn’t stop there, of course. Why should he, when there’s fun to be had? He said that an internal auditor at the Malta Maritime Authority, who is investigating the situation in which bribes were paid to obtain berths, got one of those berths irregularly himself. An immediate check ensued, and it was found that none of the internal auditors even has a berth to start with. The internal auditing is contracted out, and one of the 50 or so partners in the contracted audit firm has a berth – but he does no auditing work for the Malta Maritime Authority and he got his berth 11 years ago. When confronted with this piece of information, the ex Minister Without Portfolio didn’t say he was only joking, but that he was talking about “the internal auditors and not the auditing firm”.
Well, this pretty much cleared up the mystery of why Joe Mizzi had no portfolio when he was a minister, though it doesn’t clear up the other mystery of why he sat at Prime Minister Sant’s right hand at the Auberge de Castille. Or maybe it does. The Malta Maritime Authority paused and drew breath before it replied that they are one and the same thing, that the internal auditing is done by the auditing firm, and that another auditing firm takes care of the external auditing, because – obviously – the external auditors audit the work of the internal auditors. You could almost hear the rustle of the dictionary pages as Joe Mizzi looked up the word ‘auditing’.
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I found one of my sons boggling at a newspaper article the other day, a fairly rare occurrence. He waved the paper at me: “Look at this! It’s amazing. Can you believe that something like this actually happened?” I skimmed through the piece and told him that back in the dark ages, when I was growing up, we took that kind of thing for granted. It was par for the course, the norm, everyday existence, the reason I pulled out all the stops I could to ensure that he, born in 1987 and missing the lot of it, would have a more civilised life in a rather more dignified society. His reaction only served to remind me how my generation were sold short thanks to that sack-load of criminal and corrupt rubbish that called itself a government. And now I am expected to accept as prime minister – Leader of the Opposition is insulting enough – a man (in a wig, what’s more) who was president of the Labour Party when the corrupt Labour Party was the corrupt government.
Quite frankly, we shouldn’t be surprised at his choice of Something Fishy as his Minister Without Portfolio. We shouldn’t even be surprised if Something Fishy ends up Minister of Finance at this rate. After all, he’s looked up auditing in the dictionary.
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The newspaper story was about Lawrence Hili, an employee of an international oilfield company in Libya, in 1981. The company that employed him owed Air Malta Lm6000. Air Malta’s representative in Libya, whose name was not published because he is dead –so what; the evil that men do should live after them – told Mr Hili that he would not be allowed to leave Libya until he, personally, from his own bank account, paid those Lm6000. Not even the owner of a limited liability company can be held personally responsible for the payment funds owed by the company (except in highly specific situations), still less a mere employee who has nothing to do with it. And even if Mr Hili owed the money personally, for stuff he bought for himself, there were still legal hoops to be jumped through, like court cases and warrants of seizure.
But that’s not the point. The point is that this is yet another glaring example, one that I particularly wish to rub in the faces of people like Mr Zero Tolerance To Corruption Sant and his band of Merry Virgins led by Something Fishy, of how utterly disgusting and corrupt their precious government was. The trouble is that it wasn’t ‘their’ government, but ours – a government that stank from the head downwards and which didn’t have even the merest sliver of respect for fundamental human rights. Nowadays in Malta, complaints about human rights have been reduced to what seem to be trivialities, compared to the shocking business we had to put up with thanks to that bunch of yammering twerps, several of whom are still pontificating in Parliament. Here was a young man, held hostage in Libya by the Maltese government until he paid Lm6000 – the value of a house in those days – which he didn’t owe himself. Reminders like this make me want to spit at the television when I see Joan of Arc in his wig telling us how he has zero tolerance for corruption. He’s a fine one, isn’t he? Maybe he’s being deadpan, like Something Fishy Mizzi. And if he rushes out to tell us that he wasn’t in Malta in 1981, that he was being important at Harvard or doing God knows what, then all we have to do is remind him that the situation had deteriorated even further by the mid-1980s, when he chose to become president of the party.
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Air Malta in 1981 was an extension of the Maltese government. So the Maltese Embassy in Libya withheld Lawrence Hili’s passport. Then Air Malta told Mrs Hili, whose levels of distress would be understood by the very many others who were victims of the government’s disregard for human rights, the laws of the land, and basic decency, that her husband would not be going home unless she found those Lm6000. My son, who still finds it impossible to understand that these things really happened on a routine basis, despite having me for a mother, goggled at this. I had to stifle the urge to feel sick, and went off for a soothing cup of tea to wash away the memories that had come gagging to the surface.
Frightened Mrs Hili and her concerned father somehow gathered the money together – I remind you once more that you could buy a house for Lm6000 in 1981 – and the Air Malta representative in Libya promised that he would return it when the matter was sorted out. He never did, of course, because what we are talking about here is extortion of the most serious kind. People who extort money are criminals, and don’t return it. You might ask, as my son did, why Mrs Hili didn’t report the matter to Air Malta. “Darling,” I said, “in those days, you didn’t even report crimes to the police. The system was so corrupt that victims of corruption and crimes committed by the government, or government agencies, had absolutely no safety net. Think of one of those Third World dictatorships you study at university, and you’ll be better placed to understand.”
The case was reported in the newspapers a few days ago. It wouldn’t have been reported at the time because our newspapers didn’t do their job properly, which is partly why so many bad things were allowed to happen. Way back then, Mr and Mrs Hili sued the Air Malta official for the return of their money, and in yet another thrilling example of efficiency, the courts that take offence when they are criticised delivered their judgment now, 26 years after the extortion took place, with the extorter dying in the interim. The court found in favour of Mr and Mrs Hili, and ordered the family of the dead man to return the money. They can appeal, and the case will drag on even longer. It’s horribly unjust, and if Air Malta has a conscience, it will make an ex gratia payment of Lm6000 plus interest to Lawrence Hili, wrapping it up in a grovelling apology, and giving him free flights for the rest of his life. It’s still the same company after all, even if it’s run by different people, but there are those among us who don’t understand this concept, like the fact that the government is the government, whichever political party happens to be forming it at the time
In suing the Air Malta representative, the Hili family are making clear what anyone who reads this story is going to suspect anyway: that the Air Malta official used his position to extort a great deal of money from a hapless hostage. It was the equivalent of kidnapping: give me Lm6000 or you won’t get your husband back. But he had the support of the Maltese government, which colluded by withdrawing his passport, and he wouldn’t have been able to do this without the backing of Air Malta (otherwise, reporting him to Air Malta would have ended the matter). Corruption was institutionalised. All of this means that Mr and Mrs Hili were badly advised, and that they should have sued Air Malta – not just for the return of their money, but also for massive damages. In those days, Lawrence Hili couldn’t make a human rights case against the government for the abusive withdrawal of his passport. He’d certainly be able to do so today.
The trouble is that the corruption of those days twisted our minds, so that they stopped working properly. We stopped being able to draw lines between what was proper and what was not, so that a woman whose husband was being held hostage in another country by a corrupt official and her own corrupt government just paid up when asked to do so, instead of creating a god-almighty stink. It was hard to create a god-almighty stink in those days, because the newspapers and the police wouldn’t help you, but there were other ways and means, even if it meant the running the risk of arrest by police who picked on the victims rather than the criminals.
When looking at all those whitewashed tombs on the Opposition benches, it pays to remember this. Then you can take all the twaddle they spout about corruption and – let’s not be too graphic here – do something fishy with it.