Opinion: Can there be any hope at all?

The country is plagued by one scandal after the other and we are in danger to becoming indifferent to it all

June 5, 2023| Victor Calleja3 min read
Robert Aquilina’s book about Pilatus Bank shed light – or rather total darkness – on the nefarious ways of the people in power. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier 	Robert Aquilina’s book about Pilatus Bank shed light – or rather total darkness – on the nefarious ways of the people in power. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

When a management consultant offers advice, I listen carefully. When the advice comes for free, is not requested and starts with the assertion that I write wonderfully, I feel I’m in heaven.

But after the ecstatic introduction, I am then given a lecture about how terrible I am. Or, rather, how narrow and negative my vision is. And that to get the throngs clamouring to hear my voice, I should change tactics, start being nicer and more appealing.

The guru tells me that people are not all bad. That even those I write about in politics have a life and may be facing personal problems.

Now, if stating the truth keeps people, gurus included, away from my writing, I really do not care.

The guru I listened to mesmerised me. Here was an intelligent, young, successful person speaking. The view of most people in Malta is “let’s not really look at corruption, let’s not really look at the miserable state of our environment, let’s all live in a semi-comatose state, where all ills and ill-gotten gains are not discussed”.

Being negative, the guru says, is counterproductive. It does not build new societies, it does not create good auras where all is fine, glitzy and sweet.

This country is riven, totally riven, by endless scandals. Every day we hear of something new, scarier than what we had heard the day before. We are on the brink of being unimpressed by the gravity of it all.

These last few weeks we have had major uncovering of horrendous deeds. There was Robert Aquilina’s book about Pilatus Bank which shed light – or, rather, total darkness – on the nefarious ways of the people in power.

The book contains shocking details of how a bank was envisaged, created and used allegedly only for money laundering.

Equally shocking were the details uncovered about Joseph Muscat’s consultancies. The money paid in consultancies must be investigated. The former prime minister might state, till he turns dark blue, that he is only doing legitimate work but the amounts paid and by whom make it all sound stupendously suspicious.

This country is riven by endless scandals- Victor Calleja

The latest discovery – at least at the time this is being written – is of huge amounts paid for by Johann Schembri through his exotic bird company. Muscat considers himself very capable but why is he paid such amounts by this Schembri person? By a strange coincidence, Schembri is also managing director and shareholder of a casino gifted its lease by Muscat’s government.

To make matters worse, while all this horror is being uncovered, the opposition Nationalist Party, which should be knocking on the doors of Castille, is nowhere to be seen or heard.

When the Schembri payments to Muscat were uncovered, all Bernard Grech did was pose for some silly photos of fun and carefree jollity during some inconsequential spring festival at il-Maqluba, in Qrendi. Why didn’t the leader of the opposition speak out loudly and coherently about these payments to Muscat? And why did the PN in parliament vote in favour of the lease agreement that was concocted by Muscat’s government?

What lies behind these acts and this silence about the payments to Muscat?

In the same vein, why was little done or said about the revelations in the Pilatus book?

Is the PN, led by Grech, mesmerised by the same idiocy of my own guru who thinks that speaking out about horrors is bleak, destructive and not a crowd-puller?

If, for any reason, the PN leadership does not feel free to speak out against the likes of Schembri, then the leader and his team should make way for other people to take over.

It’s bad enough that we have a government mired in alleged corruption and demoniac cover-ups.

The last thing we need in our dying democracy is an opposition party shackled, silenced and controlled by unwholesome characters.

Victor Calleja is a former publisher.

 

 

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