I am being peppered by nasty remarks from those who support Frank Portelli and Adrian Delia – these two contenders for the Nationalist Party leadership themselves stick to being nasty at a distance – accusing me of conducting attakki oxxeni u viljakki kontrihom (a lot is lost in the literal translation, which is “obscene and knavish attacks”) because I support one of the other two candidates who I wish to control with my clique to remain in power. You have to laugh, but they take it seriously.

Truly, the heatwave must have sizzled lots of minds or maybe Malta is a place where people are actively trained not to think. Anyway, this is the spin being put about by the heavily indebted retired doctor and lawyer and their supporters readily repeat it, without stopping to ask themselves how it makes sense.

What are they saying here – that I invented bank debts of millions for both of them? That the debts do not exist, the notarised constitution of debt is a forgery, the notice published in the Government Gazette is false, and that HSBC Bank, the Courts of Justice and various notaries and others are part of this complex fraud too?

Or are they saying that I shouldn't report on these massive debts and that people should be allowed to vote for Dr Portelli and Dr Delia and then find out afterwards or preferably not at all, which is what they would wish? The astonishing thing is that no journalists are chasing them with questions about their mess of debt. Frank Portelli puts himself forward to become Opposition leader and then Prime Minister, in his 70s and with HSBC Bank chasing him for €12 million plus accumulated interest – and that’s just one of his large army of creditors – and everyone behaves as though this is somehow normal.

Then Adrian Delia comes along and says he will tell us what he owns and what he owes after he is elected Opposition leader and not before, and no journalist, Nationalist Party councillor or member of the public demands an explanation of this behaviour. What is the point of telling us afterwards?

Full disclosure should come before people vote and not afterwards. He is trying to get away with it by comparing this to the way Cabinet ministers declare their interests to parliament after they are elected. That is just the sort of fatuous and illogical comparison he uses, which he then tries to justify with a series of circular arguments which very few interviewers or interlocutors are able to withstand, precisely because those circular arguments are intended to confuse them.

All those who have common sense immediately suspected he has plenty to hide when he said this. If he had nothing to hide then he wouldn’t insist on keeping it concealed until he has been safely elected. The constitution of debt I discovered completely by chance – serendipity, as with all the best stories – was not something Dr Delia ever intended the public to know.

I think I am making an accurate guess when I say that he probably hoped to keep it secret for reasons other than electoral politics. When those he does business with know that the banks have tied him up and hung him out to dry for €7.2 million – on which there is almost €600,000 a year in interest alone – they are not going to be doing much more business with him and, more to the point, nobody is going extend him any credit on anything. Also, if he has debts with other banks, they are going to become concerned and begin tightening the screws too, to safeguard their interests.

Some supporters of Dr Delia are clutching at his emphasis on his nine per cent shareholding and interpreting this to mean that he is liable for just nine per cent of the debt. This is completely wrong. The deed of constitution of debt is a contractual agreement which makes each of the ‘sureties’ who are signatories to it – who include Adrian Delia and his wife, on whose behalf he signed – jointly and severally liable for the entire debt. It is also an admission of the debt as formally recorded by a notary, which means that the bank now does not have to go to the Courts of Justice to sue them for the money owed and get a ruling on whether they owe it. It can simply send a judicial letterto any one of the individuals named, for the entire amount of €7.2 million, giving him (or her) two days to pay the entire amount, in failure of which it will have his property sold by judicial auction.

I don’t think people have sufficiently understood the gravity of the situation, but serious lawyers like Dr Joe Ellis and Dr Mark Fenech have been explaining it on – God help us – Facebook. For the next few years until the debt is settled in full, Adrian Delia and his wife can wake up any day to find a judicial letter from HSBC Bank demanding payment of €7.2 million within two days, followed by a court auction of their assets. These are the facts. They are not an opinion.

If Alex Perici Calascione and Chris Said are owned by the banks to the tune of millions, then it should be obvious that I would break those stories too. A story is a story is a story, and the public interest is the public interest. But I haven't found any such debts, so I can't write about something that doesn't exist. Writing about their petty foibles, or seeking to equate those petty foibles with debt-default of millions, when the gravity of the problems with the other two contenders is in a separate category altogether, would not be responsible.

The supporters of Adrian Delia should be thankful that this mess has been exposed now, because he was never going to tell them. I have since discovered that the deed of constitution of debt does not have to be registered at the Public Registry because it contains no hypothecary guarantees. This means that Dr Delia (and, for that matter, his business colleagues – but they are not seeking high public office) could have kept it hidden permanently. We would have never found out about it, and as with the secret companies set up in Panama by members of the current government, we should count ourselves lucky to have found out by a fluke.

Instead of criticising, and being spiteful and bitchy because something important was discovered about their hero which he should have disclosed to us himself, they should be grateful that he was rumbled just in time. As with the Panama companies, it may make no difference to how they vote, but at least they will be voting in full awareness that they are giving their support to somebody who tried to keep important information from them, in this case about his frightening debts.

 

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