The witness who is believed to have testified that a Panama company in the name of the prime minister’s wife received millions in funds that cannot be legitimately explained is nowhere to be found and appears to have left the country.
It should not be surprising the poor woman caught in the vortex of the worst corruption scandal in Maltese history, in fear for her life and the life of her children, cut and ran. What should have been surprising is that she stayed as long as she did and had the unlikely courage of a stranger in a strange land to speak up about what she knew.
Perhaps ironically it is because she was a stranger in a strange land that she had no idea in reality what she was up against, alone, without income and without prospects of employment, without family and without any promise of reward, that she went as far as she did.
The utter inability of the droves of people – across political affiliations – to empathise with the woman would be incredible were it not for the collective dehumanisation of foreigners, particularly East European women, that is so pervasive in our community.
The woman was away from her country. She moved here because she wanted a good life for herself and her family. She wanted nothing more than to work, make more money than she would have at home and enjoy the legendary sun and friendly people of Malta.
I don’t know this because I met her. I have no idea what she looks like. But my uncle went to Australia when he was 18 and it wasn’t to face down the police there. It was because he had few opportunities here and he wanted a good life for himself. He got it and he stayed there, getting news of his parent’s deaths in the post. If at any point he thought things could be better for him back here, he’d have been here in no time.
This is a story most Maltese families can tell about any given uncle. And yet we are unable to put ourselves in the shoes of a Russian woman who came here for exactly the same reason.
She was exploited by her employer who made her work and did not pay her. She was unlucky in finding a job with an employer who was up to no good and to have joined up right when shit was hitting the fan. They actually tried to pin the shit on her.
Thinking she was in a civilised country where workers were not exploited and slavery had been abolished she appealed to the authorities to help her get her salary paid. She had no income to pay highfalutin lawyers with and in any case what she stood to recover would not have paid the legal fees. So on her own she researched who she needed to speak to in the labyrinth that is our bureaucracy.
Her former employer fought back and used its considerably disproportionate resources to intimidate her and silence her. The police, ever happy to take sides against the underdog, especially if it’s a Russian woman, presumably a whore, pushed her around and treated her like a criminal.
It’s such a familiar scene it is almost a cliché. A foreigner and a woman in a racist, misogynist society hated for being, let alone immigrating and worse getting out of her place by arguing her point instead of being compliant and grateful for being tolerated.
Foreign women get ‘go back to your country’ here for much less. If they dare insist the bus driver gives them time to lock their push-chair before driving off like a maniac they get howled at by the crowd.
And this all happened to this particular woman even before she realised she was in possession of what she considered to be evidence our prime minister was stashing illicit funds through a vehicle in his wife’s name.
If you’ve ever witnessed a foreign woman being hissed at by the mob on a rough bus ride, try to imagine what this woman went through when instead of complaining about an incompetent, but local, bus driver, she complained about a corrupt prime minister.
He may be corrupt, the collective psychosis prescribes, but he’s local. And if local he is beyond the reproach of a foreign whore.
The mob did not need priming. This was an all too familiar script. The friendly, smiling, crusty and tanned Maltese people she saw on the brochures when she looked for options on where to move to, became a cackling crowd of crones at the bloody steps of the guillotine.
The screws of police pressure tightened and the threat of formal, institutional retribution for daring to expose one of their own – the most prominent and powerful of them all – became too much. She was up against the Napoleon of crime, the boss of bosses, the first consul of caporegimes whose Achilles heel she had tickled by what she’d said she’d seen.
How to get away with crime 101. Scare the witness off.
He didn’t actually have to do much and he did more than he needed. I suppose Joseph Muscat’s loony theories that she was a spy on Vladimir Putin’s brief to harm him, supposedly based on unshakable information from the CIA and MI5, are now out the window.
It’s incredible she stayed as long as she did.