It’s been around 15 years since I last worked in public relations, but if Silvio Debono and Arthur Gauci were my clients, especially in the run-up to a bond issue – I worked on more than a few of those in the past – I would know that my job is to keep them in line before they make an even bigger mess of their own reputations than they have already done. Their advisers are doing the opposite of what they are meant to do, and instead of managing the situation, they are making it worse. In simple terms, they are helping their clients to damage their own reputation.
Debono and Gauci filed 19 libel suits against me in a single day, all about the same subject matter. They did not do this to set the record straight or to protect their reputation. They did it to retaliate. Libel suits are not filed to protect one’s reputation, because years pass before you have a judgement. They are filed for damages. Your reputation is protected by the simple and timely expedient of issuing a statement which sets the record straight, as you see it, gives your version of events, as you see them, and which is published by the perceived offending medium as the ‘right to reply’ in terms of the Press Act. That way, people who have read the offending article will within hours be able to read your response to it.
Debono and Gauci have instead released a statement to other media, but not to my website, saying that I have lied about them and slandered them, but have not bothered to say where, when or how. The net result is that people are none the wiser about what these lies are, or what the slander is. The record has not been set straight, and the reason for that is that they cannot set it straight. Opinions based on fact are protected under the law. If those two individuals give money to a political party and then demand the money back when they realise it hasn’t bought the silence or cooperation they wanted, then people like me are free to call them corrupt. If they acquire a large tract of public land in a sought-after area, for speculation involving towers of flats, from a government which also consents to shift an entire catering college to accommodate them and their money-making schemes, then we are free to call them corrupt – especially when the call for expressions of interest was exactly as transparent as that used for the public hospitals and the power station project.
The trouble is that Maltese society is so hopelessly corrupt that people are no longer able to recognise corruption for what it is, or to define it. We have reached the stage where it is apparently entirely normal for business operators who systematically buy the services of politicians and the politically influential by engaging their services in a consultancy or advisory capacity, or by donating money and services to political parties, can get themselves large pieces of public land to build flats on, and the only thing that is an issue is the price he pays for the land rather than the fact that they got it in the first place. Nobody asks: but why did they get it? Why is the government shifting the catering college to an inconvenient location, at a cost to the taxpayer of €75 million, to be able to hand those individuals a chunk of public land on which to build?
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Silvio Debono and Arthur Gauci accuse me generically of lying about them and slandering them, but when I gave them the chance to respond to very specific questions, they did not do so. Over the past few days, I have sent questions to their public relations man, Lou Bondi, about why Silvio Debono took a senior tax department official with him when he travelled abroad to buy a Maserati, and about the nature of his involvement with a Cypriot man implicated in cigarette-smuggling in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe. I received no reply, not even a “we will not be commenting about this”. The questions were so specific, and the subject matter so serious, that an organisation or person with a reputation to protect would have jumped right in there with a series of specific clarifications or denials. They failed to answer at all because no clarification or denial is possible.
Silvio Debono will soon be asking people to give him their money to help him build those flats on what should remain public land. Bonds are money loaned by the public. In such circumstances, it is absolutely imperative that he explains to that public the nature and extent of his relationship – personal and business – with a man who was at the centre of a big investigation, some years ago, into smuggling cigarettes using Cyprus as a hub. What people want and deserve is explanations, not retaliatory action against journalists who discover and report on the matters that Silvio Debono would rather keep hidden.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com