Former European Commissioner John Dalli, who was given half an hour to clear his desk at the European Commission and then went on to evade prosecution in Malta and fight prosecution abroad, has accused this newspaper of killing his wife and has called me “that terrorist”.
“I have a right to work,” he said to a journalist from this newspaper, in a telephone interview. “Don’t I have a right to have a client? Can’t I have a client?” Yes, of course he can have a client. He can even have two clients if he wishes. And our job here – this newspaper, this terrorist, other journalists – is to chase after him, try to work out what he’s doing, and scrutinise both him and what he’s up to with his clients. This is because nothing about John Dalli seems to be straight or above board.
If he had a good reputation, we wouldn’t bother. There would be no news in it, nothing to investigate, nothing to report to our readers, to the public. But he doesn’t have a good reputation. He has a very bad one, and the press and the public are left with the sneaking suspicion that he’s always up to something shady, hovering there below the radar, pulling strings and fixing deals. That Bahamas flit, for instance – wasn’t that amazing? From Cyprus to the Bahamas via London and back again in 48 hours, telling his European Commission colleagues that he was leaving his EU meeting in Cyprus because of family problems at home in Malta.
And then there was that snus business with his sleazy sidekick Silvio tal-Imqaret. Imagine that: a European Commissioner hanging around with Silvio tal-Imqaret and scheduling his meetings when in Malta at Peppi’s imqaret kiosk on the plastic chairs surrounded by howling babies in pushchairs and bright red people in sarongs. But then his goat-like behaviour is as nothing compared to his deal-brokering beneath the surface.
John Dalli has much in common with other notorious men in Maltese public life, in politics and out of it. They suffer from a pathological obsession that they are being unfairly and unjustly persecuted, and though they know they are in the wrong, they scream and shout like martyred victims in public. There’s something else about them that is completely abnormal. Usually, a person who is caught doing something wrong and somehow manages to get away with it (and even if he doesn’t) will say, right, now I’ll just keep quiet, count myself lucky that I wriggled out of it, and just shut up and keep quiet and be grateful. But no – these specimens are never happy that they got away with it.
They will not rest until they have destroyed or damaged the individuals they believe are responsible for their distress. And as you have gathered, these individuals are never themselves. They are always somebody else, and they will go doggedly after that person until they get him or her. In a perverse and twisted way, they see this not so much as obtaining revenge, but as proving to themselves and others that they were right all along and innocent. Getting away with it is not enough. They also have to destroy their accusers.
Dalli would now have us believe that he has nothing to do with the government which has protected him from prosecution. He would have us believe that he has nothing to do with the Prime Minister who appointed him, calling in the press cameras for the purpose, his health consultant even as he was hounded by the European Commission’s prosecutor.
He would have us believe that he has nothing to do with the privatisation deal for St Luke’s Hospital and Gozo General Hospital – even though a leaked due diligence report which I quoted in full a couple of days ago on my website clearly described how a “senior former government minister” flew out to Dubai to meet subcontractors and explain to them how they could get the work from the Malta government. That could only have been John Dalli. There is no other former Nationalist minister who is working for the Labour government, except for Jesmond Mugliett, who can neither be described as “senior” nor in any way involved in wheeling and dealing at that level.
Meanwhile, Dalli firmly joins the ranks of those certain Maltese men in public life, one of them in the press and the others former Nationalist politicians who now work for this government, who are rendered completely hysterical at the mere mention of my name, and who think that I am responsible for all the nation’s (read, their) ills. Good luck to them. I’m sure there’s a pill they can take for that kind of problem.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com