If the Minister for the Economy really were somewhere other than the FKK Acapulco on Monday night last week, he would have done the obvious: issued a civilised and measured press statement while still in Germany the following morning, made himself available to journalists – including me, the one who reported on the matter, and then called a press conference at the airport or at his office immediately on his return to Malta a couple of days later. He would have told the press, calmly and with perfect confidence, where he was and what he was doing, he would have contacted me to set the record straight as others have done before him (including Labour politicians), and only after all that would he have sued for libel damages.

But that is what an innocent man would have done. Instead, Chris Cardona and Joe Gerada actively avoided the press, with Gerada even refusing to take my calls and taking down his Facebook page before I had mentioned his name. They shot past journalists in their car when they returned to Malta, avoided journalists’ questions for days after that, Cardona made a staged and controlled appearance on TVM and still didn’t say where he was and what he done on Monday night, and neither of them sued for libel immediately, when filing a libel suit is straightforward and requires no evidence at that stage or complicated documents.

They were playing a waiting game to see whether a film or photographs would emerge. Then, when they didn’t, they began filing libel suits in a staggered fashion. First, they filed two each against me, four in all, and now they say they will be filing more against me and others against individual journalists working for the Nationalist Party media. They are not interested in clearing their name. They could have done so at this stage already if they could. They are interested in exacting their revenge, creating problems for me by freezing my bank accounts for the duration of the cases that may take years, and are not even interested in the outcome and the verdict, because by that time it will all be water under the bridge anyway.

When Chris Cardona made his first speech as deputy leader of the Labour Party and said that he would go after with an axe those who went after him with a dagger, it wasn’t empty political rhetoric. These people have a set of values all of their own, driven by lust, money, greed, power and material acquisitions. They will stop at nothing and they are completely unbothered by how the public perceives them. Any decent politician would have factored in the public relations aspect of doing something like this to a journalist who holds him up to scrutiny and reports on his wrong-doing, but then no decent politician would be in Chris Cardona’s shoes right now.

Cardona – the Minister for the Economy who has just renewed Konrad Mizzi’s wife’s obscene contract for a Shanghai non-job – doesn’t care what people think. None of them care what people think. I would think that at this stage they are even past caring whether people will vote for them or not. They have segued naturally in their public image from (fake) liberal and progressive to downright fascist and oppressive. They have given up trying to convert people to their cause and maintain their support by doing the right thing. They only needed and wanted to do that until they got the votes to put themselves into power. Once they were in power, it was a matter of smash, grab, rape, pillage, loot, grab and raid. Their started out by buying or ‘bribing’ their actual or potential critics into silence or compliance and then moved on to attempting to silence, through fear and harassment, or the fear of harassment, those who could not or would not be bought.

The country is in dire straits, and the economy ‘doing well’ means nothing if the things which keep us safe and sane are systematically done away with. Even the economy ‘doing well’ is a bubble that is set to explode in our faces, built as it is on dirty money and finite measures like the sale of citizenship, on corruption and filthy deals.

Decent, upright people who held public office have resigned or been unceremoniously removed. Those who remain are being systematically frightened or coerced into submission. Others leave because they feel it is not worth the pain of staying on to try to do what is right, leaving the way clear for corrupt, dirty officials and cronies to replace them. Malta has been plunged down a very frightening sink-hole, and now journalists are being targeted by Labour politicians with the threat of having their bank accounts frozen under maliciously-filed libel suits, even libel suits they know they have no hope of winning. All they want is that immediate revenge and the headlines. Yesterday afternoon and evening I was literally swamped by messages from members of the public and above all, from journalists in all media except the Labour Party’s, who have understood that what was done to me sets a precedent and is a warning salvo to them too.

It is not going to get better. It is going to get worse. As the general election approaches, they are going to do everything they can to hang on to power, taking desperate measures to avoid the inevitable investigation and prosecution if the Nationalists are elected instead. They have too much to lose if they don’t make it to power for another five years, and too much to gain from another five years of looting and corruption. It’s going to get really nasty, and dirty, and for journalists above all, this is going to be the worst year any of us has ever known. We are going to be fighting a nightmare scenario of lies, half-truths, evasion and corrupt deals in the shadows. We have our work cut out for us, and for this year alone if no other, all journalists who are not actually employed by the Labour Party and its fellow media have got to pull together and recognise the bald fact that we have a common enemy. And then we have got to fight it, because it is certainly fighting us and wants to fight us to the death.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com