As I write this, I have one eye on CNN – waiting for the outcome of America’s knife-edge election. Hopefully by the time you read this on Sunday morning, the world will no longer be on tenterhooks, and we’ll have a better idea if the world’s most powerful nation will have a president who is less orange, less CAPS loving, and less volatile.
While channelling this North American mood, I came across the works of one of the founding fathers of the modern United States: Benjamin Franklin, the political philosopher who wrote the American Constitution.
Franklin gives me the impression that he was a rather hyper sort of chap who was up and about at the crack of dawn, sleeves rolled up, inventing electricity, playing the harp, editing newspapers, playing chess, inventing bifocal glasses, playing the violin, travelling the world, playing the guitar and writing political literature right up till the wee hours of the morning.
There’s no denying he was a wise man, and wrote many a quotable thing – a social media poet ahead of his time. One of the things he wrote, as it were, was: “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one.”
Uh, I thought. Isn’t this just about the perfect quote for Malta at this very point in time? We’re living a never-ending Mafia movie with twists and turns and gasps at every angle – only, it’s very real and the constant central theme is money.
Week after week, we’ve been subjected to the horrors that money can generate. Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated because of money. And it is the money trail which led to the alleged masterminds: people swimming in avalanches of cash, clamouring for more.
Perhaps the person who epitomises all this is Yorgen Fenech, the man accused of plotting the murder of Caruana Galizia. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth: all his life he knew nothing but immeasurable riches and instant gratification. Money for him was the be it and all, the solution to everything, even to friendships.
His ‘friends’ seem to be a prime minister who accepted his thousands-of-euro-a-pop wines and watches; a chief of staff with whom he swapped rabbit recipes while planning corrupt power station deals; MPs he wined and dined and/or bedded; an assistant police commissioner who couldn’t resist a paid trip to Kiev to watch a football game even though Fenech was a suspect and so on and so forth. Put simply, Fenech had to buy his friends.
He led a life full of extravagant thrills but these were not distracting enough – instead of admiring the sea views from the top of his Tumas tower, his face was stuck to his mobile phone. He spent all his waking hours texting people furiously: ministers, junior ministers, taxi drivers. He bought everyone’s companionship and services, but, it seems, he could not buy their loyalty. That’s the trouble – you can’t throw money at everything because some things you simply can’t buy.
But Fenech has no concept of that, which is why his defence team thought nothing of issuing a wad of €500 notes to buy favourable reporting in the Times of Malta. Fenech’s lawyer, Gianluca Caruana Curran, who carried out the heinous under-the-table act is the grandson of Guido de Marco – a prime politician and criminal lawyer who believed in the power of persuasion and not of money. So, we are left wondering: is this what we’ve come to?
You can’t throw money at everything because some things you simply can’t buy- Kristina Chetcuti
And then who should pipe up expressing his shock but Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis. His apoplectic fit about how worried he is that Fenech’s lawyer is not respecting democracy, is hilarious.
Zammit Lewis forgot that he himself was in Fenech’s pocket; they were text buddies and used to regularly wine and dine together when it was already known to the world that Fenech was the owner of the secret 17 Black company, which fed corrupt €5,000-a-day into the pockets of Joseph Muscat’s friends: Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.
What’s depressing is that Malta does not seem to have a moral compass to look up to. The President of the Republic you might say? True, only last year he told the nation that “the Republic of Malta is far bigger than the gang of people who brought shame on our country”.
But now we know that his son-in-law was part of that gang. Joe Cuschieri, Malta Financial Services Authority CEO, with a penchant for photoshoots of himself in pensive poses tugging at his cuffs, also thought nothing of accepting gifts of extravagant vacations from Fenech, and hobnobbing with him in Las Vegas breaching all sorts of European Central Bank code of ethics.
“Let us defend our country’s name, especially with those who could use this turn of events to harm and belittle Malta’s image abroad,” President George Vella had told us. Charity begins at home I suppose.
As we watch this horror story unfold, we can do nothing but emulate Benjamin Franklin, roll up our sleeves and work for justice from the crack of dawn till twilight, for as he said: “What is more valuable than gold? Diamonds. Than diamonds? Virtue.”
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti