I suppose I should be flattered that, yet again, Mr Stephen Calleja has dedicated much of his week to finding out things I didn’t know about myself, both fact and fiction. (“FAA head’s private shareholding could mean exclusion from Mepa board, 21 February”).
Mr Calleja is also to be congratulated for having a brilliant academic future in historical research, for since excavating Lino Bugeja’s land deal of half-a-century ago, he was emboldened to start on my family history. May I give Stephen Calleja a tip – getting dates right is essential for success in history.
The lengths our Stephen seems to have gone to with his archaeological fling are truly amazing. He got it all, down to quoting the antiquated jargon of company articles of association drawn up nearly 50 years ago and yet he claimed that the company was set up in 1998 when, in fact, it was set up in 1965. Considering Stephen Calleja even enlightened me that I own all of 16.7 per cent of a defunct company, a percentage that I wasn’t aware of since the company has been dormant since I was a teenager, how could he have made such a glaring mistake? Could it be that he gave 1998 as the set-up date in order to implicate me in some wrongdoing, since revealing the truth that it was set up when I was just six years old would not have had the desired effect? No, not our Stephen, never!
Fools that we were, in the intervening 35 years neither I nor my co-heirs of this dead company ever ran up any high-rises, villas in ODZ, or farmhouses in Natura 2000 sites, no, not even one miserable tool-room! The sum total of my glorious career as a construction magnate was to ensure that our flats were kept painted and stairs washed. And if this were not unrewarding enough, I add that I do not aspire to a place on a Mepa Board as, in fact, Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar disagrees with NGO committee members occupying such posts. Sorry to disappoint you Stephen!
My only ‘sin’ was therefore to inherit some shares in an almost defunct company in 1975, the sum total of my status as a member of the new Maltese aristocracy – a construction “shareholder”. Having come clean with my heinous crimes against humanity, it would be refreshing to finally have Mr Calleja explain exactly what agenda drives him to do his best to discredit environmental activists week in, week out, even digging up and manipulating irrelevant events of half-a-century ago in his futile attempts to do so. Attempts to intimidate me are doing quite the opposite and are in fact strengthening my resolve to continue speaking out in defence of heritage and the environment.
A final word of career counselling to Mr. Calleja: when you throw mud, make sure it doesn’t land back in your face.
Astrid Vella
SLIEMA