However deep the secrets behind the rape of Malta by Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Konrad Mizzi, and Edward Scicluna are buried there will always be a day of reckoning. That day is getting closer and closer because, just like the secret behind the emperor’s donkey’s ears which the hairdresser with access to the secret could not keep, but had to go out and whisper it to the river banks to be repeated by the wind whenever it blew.
“The emperor has donkey’s ears,” repeated the reeds in the wind for all to hear. So are the revelations in the Pilatus book, the Mark Camilleri reproduction of the Rosianne/Yorgen chats, the fumbling answers of Keith Schembri to the Parliamentary Committee where he contradicted Edward Scicluna indicting him as a knowing accomplice.
Schembri even admitted that Egrant now belongs to nobody because, in his own words, “he did not have enough time to use it”.
So, it was a he, the high-ranking VIP whose name Karl Cini could not put down on an email but had to transmit verbally in Skype call a long, long time ago. It was a he and it was the highest-ranking VIP. Who in Malta is higher ranking than Keith and Konrad? The Speaker, rhe President, the Archbishop, or the Prime Minister? The choice is yours and the reeds will whisper the name when, as the Pope reminded us in his homily, the Tramuntana winds will blow with their corruption over Malta. Yes we often have Grigal or Xlokk winds prevailing. That’s why the reeds have not whispered loud enough yet. Yet, is the operative word.
I do not have great desire to go out on a windy day when the north wind, foreseen in his wisdom by the Pope, blows over Malta. Many others in their blogs and in their research do a better job at it.
I only repeat what, I believe, many Maltese are thinking when I pen my articles.
And what about the hospitals fraud by Vitals and Stewarts and the cabinets of Muscat and Abela? Is someone soon going to spill the beans, to squeal in fear of a looming prison sentence? The sounds are beginning to come from the swaying reeds in the wind.
I would advise my readers to listen to the reeds. “The emperor has donkey’s ears.”
The AG and the Police Chiefs, all seven of them in the last ten years (probably a record turnover amongst the 27 EU member states) have worked hard cutting all the water areas where reeds grow in Malta and Gozo, helped by the likes of Stivala and the developers, or Transport Malta who can see nothing growing anywhere but get gripped by an uncontrollable desire to chop it down.
I think they should be awarded the Golden Scythe award by our President, famous for running away from giving his assent to laws he does not agree with. He, too, was there when the deep secrets were buried by Joseph, Keith, Konrad, et al, and did not travel abroad but voted for all the deals connected with hospitals, power stations, wind power deals, visits to Azerbaijan, setting up of banks like Pilatus and Panama companies.
What a petty gang of robbers we voted in in 2013! They hid the evidence with their accomplices like the former and present AG and the seven dwarves who ran our police force but it was the Maltese electorate, who voted them in time and again. We are to blame for this mess.
And what about the airline? A refuge of canvassers and children of parents who sold their votes for a job “għat-tifel”, which is such a typical syndrome of mafia led societies. We, the Maltese, suffer from this congenital disease. We succumb to the temptations of an economic fix and give away our freedom, our birth right, our human independence.
We do not think with our God-given brain but we think, if at all, with our wallet. The mess the airline is in is not something created today. However, the Konrad Mizzi period of managing its political leadership, with the numerous chairmen who succeeded one another has been an utter business test case of how to destroy economic value.
Many small airlines like the Greek, Italian, Swiss and others also went through similar distress periods. It is only obvious that the marketplace does not tolerate airlines that do not have enough economies of scale to survive without constant state aid. State aid is an anti-competitive measure forbidden in democratic societies that are based upon open market economies like ours. It stands to reason that a national airline in the EU which has around 4 or 5 million passengers a year and not 100 or 500 million passengers cannot compete and is doomed to be engulfed by one of the big four.
Similarly, the same is true for the US market and for the Asian markets. It is only unfair on the employees to see how this national asset was allowed to degenerate into such a catastrophic state. Who were the shady persons who are now emerging from the shadows after having received multimillion consultancy agreements that led the company to disaster. Who are they? What did they contribute? Or were they another front for Mizzi and company to receive back handers into their Panama companies?
One must wait for the whispering of the reeds to find that out. Maybe, the hairdresser in our case will be Karl Cini. Or it will be Konrad who seems to have found a renewed religious fervour in old age. Or it will be the result of questioning under oath of Keith Schembri that will spill the beans.
This seems to have the ingredients of a really good Agatha Christie or Father Brown thriller with a twist at the end. I cannot wait.