Due to another commitment, I had to miss GO’s annual general meeting last week at the Hilton.

As it happened, one of the commitments I had was an interview with the Israeli Ambassador Gideon Meir, who was supposed to be at the Hilton but was at Cordina’s in Valletta. But that’s another story.

As I left the Hilton, I could see GO shareholders and officials coming out. Whispers reached me that the AGM had been a rather turbulent one.

But according to some of those present, the shareholders were more incensed about pension rights, as they, many being former Maltacom employees, had every right to be, and over the serious question of GO not giving them free parking, which meant that for a couple of pastizzi they had to pay some e3.

So that’s why the whole hill up to the Regional Road was packed full of parked cars, unusual at any day.

Anyway, it seems that none of the shareholders asked one single question about what happened to GO’s investment in Forthnet, one of the prime causes of GO’s bad results last year.

There is a webcast of the AGM on di-ve.com and I intend to check this story out.

From No-Go to candidate

The Nationalist Party machine is making a mountain of a molehill with regard to Sharon Ellul Bonici’s MEP candidacy and her past as a eurosceptic, making it sound that once you have been a eurosceptic you should not even dream of going to Brussels.

I well remember Sharon in her anti-EU days. Specifically during the December 2002 summit in Copenhagen, when Malta was pushing to obtain the accession funds it ultimately got, while Sharon together with a mostly No Global crowd was fighting the police in the streets close to where the summit was being held.

We watched from the safety of inside the great hall as they passed by, and Sharon later came to meet us to tell us about the water cannon and the baton charges.

Yet, this is no disqualifier. One of the key people inside the European Parliament itself is Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who led the riots on the barricades in May 1968 in Paris. The old firebrand is still impish, irrepressible, and pugnacious today, as I saw during an editors’ conference in Brussels just a few weeks ago.Not forgetting Joschka Fischer either, another firebrand to establishment figure.