You know Mark Camilleri is a massive threat to Labour from the blitzkrieg approach they took to destroy him. Camilleri boldly revealed the truth about Labour’s top brass and its modus operandi. Labour knows the most powerful weapon against it is the truth – especially when it’s wielded by one of its own.
With trademark vindictiveness, Labour mobilised every part of its arsenal to annihilate Camilleri. With lightning speed, the usually slothful attorney general sprang to action. Police Commissioner Anġlu Gafà concluded his investigations within hours. You’d think Malta faced some cataclysmic threat to its security. But it was just the truth being leaked.
Ironically, Camilleri released those damning chats between Yorgen Fenech and Rosianne Cutajar because he’d completely lost trust in the police and the attorney general. He knew well what those chats revealed – criminal proximity between an alleged murderer and money launderer and the former prime minister and his chief of staff. Those chats revealed how Fenech had unfettered access to decisions taken by the prime minister and how a member of parliament used him to push for a cabinet post.
Camilleri probably knows far more about what the rest of those chats show. He waited for years for the police and the AG to take action against those responsible for the corrupt deals behind Electrogas, Vitals, Mozura, Pilatus and others. Nothing happened. The police had access to those chats. But, as with the FIAU reports about Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, they simply locked them away.
Camilleri realised there was no point waiting. He knew the police wouldn’t act. He gambled he would rather face jail and a steep fine. So he published those chats.
Those chats reveal important information of public interest. More importantly, they reveal the truth. And Labour’s not having that.
If anybody had any faith left in the attorney general or the police commissioner, that trust was destroyed by the shameless way in which both allowed themselves to be suborned by Labour to flog Camilleri.
Labour wants to teach Camilleri a lesson. It’s making an example out of him. It wants everybody else within the party to know that any dissent, any revelations of the truth will be met with brute force.
Labour is petrified that others will be emboldened to speak up, to uncover more of their rottenness, to leak more information about the abusive behaviour of its ministers and prime minister. It’s making it clear that anybody breaking rank will be met with unbridled ferocity at lightening speed.
But Robert Abela has miscalculated. Increasingly, he is looking more and more out of touch. Camilleri is a committed socialist. Yes, he is a maverick, a loose cannon, possibly a megalomaniac but he’s still a Labour maverick – and he’s only telling the truth. Abela’s brutal response against him left many, even within Labour’s ranks, flinching from the injustice of it all.
Camilleri may be accused of many things but he is a socialist. His socialist credentials were never in doubt. Not the same can be said of Abela. Or Cutajar.
In a ‘pick-the-real-socialist’ contest, nobody would pick Abela over Camilleri.
Abela knows it.
Abela’s staunch defence of Cutajar and his frontal attack on Camilleri has riled many socialists. They know that Camilleri’s motives are genuine, his actions brave. Not so Abela’s.
Robert Abela’s staunch defence of Rosianne Cutajar and his frontal attack on Mark Camilleri has riled many socialists- Kevin Cassar
Abela’s desperate to hide his folly at letting Cutajar contest with Labour and his madness at making her chair of the parliamentary health committee, mere days after being found guilty of ethics breaches.
He’s even more desperate to cover up for his predecessor, Joseph Muscat who allowed Fenech unprecedented direct access to Castille. He’s using all his power to stifle the truth about Fenech’s knowledge about key government decisions, even before Labour’s own MPs.
Abela instructed all his MPs not to reply to questions about the chats. He wants to kill the story. Because it exposes him for the dunce he really is. He’s trying to redeem himself. “Yes, I consider myself a socialist,” he pleaded. Unfortunately, many, even from within Labour, don’t. Alfred Sant, Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, Desmond Zammit Marmarà, Yana Mintoff and even Sammy Meilaq have been denouncing him for abandoning those socialist principles.
Most others doubt whether he ever embraced those principles at all. Much of his past conduct smacks of crony capitalism, not of socialism.
It’s difficult to reconcile his penchant for touring the Mediterranean on his luxury yacht with socialist principles. Or his repeated vacations at the exclusive Marina di Ragusa, even during COVID time.
Abela exploited the property market for his personal profit by twinning with developer Gilbert Bonnici to develop a million-euro apartment block in L-Iklin. He entered into land speculation when he made a €45,000 profit from a deal with a man later accused of kidnapping, money laundering and narcotics smuggling.
He rented his uninhabitable property to absent Russians to help them cheat themselves to a Maltese passport. He awarded his business partners, Bonnici Brothers, over €12 million in direct contracts. Malta Enterprise gave them undisclosed sums of money to invest in a €2.1 million plant at Ta’ Zuta quarry, Dingli. Abela shamelessly inaugurated that plant himself.
When the Miriam Pace report was presented to him, he hid it for months to protect his business partners, the developers. When he failed to act on that report’s recommendations and Jean Paul Sofia was killed, he refused to set up a public inquiry. Those are not the actions of a socialist.
Those are the actions of a property developer, a land speculator, a landlord, a crony capitalist. They are the excesses of gluttonous greed and reckless abuse of power.
When Abela unleashed his wrath on Camilleri, he stoked the ire of true socialists who know Camilleri is more of a socialist than Abela ever was. When Abela manipulates the institutions to destroy that socialist for daring to expose the truth, he provokes the country’s rage.