General Workers Union man, very close friend of ex Super One chief Jason Micallef, Labour Party hanger-on, and long-time henchman of the late Lorry Sant, Ronnie Pellegrini, is to replace Mark Portelli as chairman of Malta Freeport.

The news is not official, but I have it on good authority from a member of my international worldwide network of spies. They are expecting Pellegrini to turn up at the office as from tomorrow.

This allows us to see in a new light Pellegrini’s GWU-leased car, complete with expired ‘parking in restricted areas for journalists on official duties only’ permit, parked on the pavement and blocking traffic outside the Auberge de Castille yesterday morning (see one of yesterday’s posts).

Jason and Ronnie: chairman of Valletta 2018 and chairman of Malta Freeport.

What can we say? Qabza fil-kwalita, from David Felice and Mark Portelli to Jason Micallef and Ronnie Pellegrini.

Frederick Testa – a man who turned himself into an electoral campaign circus act in return for a salary

Key note electoral campaign testimonials are, in developed democracies, given by stand-out individuals and high-achievers, by those who have actually done something admirable with their lives.

The idea is that those who are listening to them will say, “I admire that man/woman. He/She has really achieved a lot that is good. I respect his/her choices, and think they have been wise. If he/she is voting Labour, then perhaps I should consider doing the same, because obviously, he/she has thought about it and that’s the kind of person whose decisions you don’t dismiss out of hand.”

But Malta’s serious problems with critical thinking and analysis meant that the Labour Party didn’t have to do that. It just rounded up some assorted detritus – for with just a couple of exceptions, its testimonials were given by people who were are notable for not having done much with their lives, if anything at all – and ran with them.

People who can think critically said to themselves that if Labour had resorted to using low-achievers – life’s failures, actually – then it was because it couldn’t persuade any true achievers to speak at their meetings or be plastered on their billboards. This doesn’t mean that no true achievers were going to vote Labour (they must have done), but that they didn’t want to be associated with that decision in public. And that says a great deal.

But in any case, this is about Frederick Testa, a man a year away from his pension, who has dredged about all his life doing nothing in particular. He was presented to us by the Labour Party as an ‘attur’ – because you can really make a living out of that in a population of around 450,000, and I don’t think he even made the effort to ever try his luck elsewhere, which requires guts, bravery and steely determination.

We were told some weeks ago that Testa had been engaged by the state broadcasting as a consultant on televised drama. I had written at the time that I can’t believe they’re actually paying somebody to help them pick the season’s soap opera or teledramm. Is that a real job, or what? What does somebody like that do all that for a full-time salary?

It was so obviously a way of giving Testa state money and finding a justification for doing so.

No details were forthcoming until Nationalist MP Ryan Callus asked a question in parliament and got the answer last night. The Malta Independent is running the story.

The Minister of Police, Army, Justice and Broadcasting (whose wife sends the household skivvies to the Mainguard fountain with jerry-cans to load up on public water for the Mallia household baths) said in reply that Testa has been given a 12-month contract “for specific projects connected with the Public Broadcasting Services”, for which he is being paid Eur 2,350 a month.

That should take him right up to his state pension, then, as Testa is 60.

Do you know what I find most fascinating about this story, other than the quite obvious bumming and repaying of party servants with public money? That these Luddites, so modern and liberal and progressive, still think in terms of old money. Eur 2,350 is quite literally ‘elf lira fix-xahar’.

The Zerafa sisters, left to right: Alison, whose husband is the President’s chauffeur, Darleen, who is personal assistant to the President’s wife, and Lydia, who is married to the President’s son. Il-Palazz huwa taghna lkoll.

Did anyone else notice the President’s facial expression (to say nothing of his tone and words) when he said on TVHemm yesterday, about Darleen’s flights to Italy on low-cost airlines:

“Taf kif kienet tivvjagga din? Tat-twerwir….”

And if I heard right, there were also a couple of references to “miskina”.

The President should know better than to reveal that extent of personal interest in an employee, in public and on television. An employee is an employee is an employee, and here, staring at us in the face, is one reason why the President should never have a personal relationship, either familial or friendship, with those engaged for work at the Palace – because then it is impossible to disengage afterwards and maintain the correct distance.

So now we have had the President making a fool of himself over Darleen Zerafa on an early evening interview show. Just fabulous.

So it turns out that not only has Lydia Abela nee Zerafa planted one of her sisters – Darleen – in her mother-in-law’s chamber as lady-in-waiting (they call it ‘personal assistant’ nowadays) and had her insinuated onto the Community Chest Fund board as secretary, but she has had the husband of another of her sisters, Alison, taken on as her father-in-law’s chauffeur.

Alison Zerafa is Labour mayor of Bormla. Darleen used to be Labour deputy mayor of Bormla.

Who are the more trusted courtiers/servants in the palace household? With the First Lady, it’s her lady-in-waiting/personal assistant. And with the president, assuming he does not have a valet (and if he does, he’s bound to be related to Lydia), it’s his chauffeur.

These are two of the most ‘intimate’ roles in the palace household, because you are privy to all sorts of information, are forced into a situation of intimacy, and know secrets.

So Lydia Zerafa (Labour Party official, remember) marries the president’s son. She plants sister Darleen Zerafa in her mother-in-law’s chambers and sister Alison Zerafa’s husband in her father-in-law’s car.

Who needs MI5?

Smart woman, that Lydia Abela. Like I always say, it’s the soft-spoken ones playing doe-eyed feminine that you’ve got to watch out for, because they’re invariably the ones with a cunning plan, nerves of steel and titanium claws.

So now we know why the President sits next to his chauffeur on official business. It’s not only because it’s the naff thing to do, but because his chauffeur is his son’s brother-in-law. Must be terribly awkward, but with these people, you never know.

Anyway, Mr Alison Zerafa is far right in the group picture. Another picture shows him with his wife, and yet another shows him driving the president around in the official limo.

The President said on TVHemm that Darleen Zerafa has not ‘applied’ for the job of running the eating disorders centre and that she has no intention of applying.

Applied? Was there a call?

And the cat must really have got Norman Vella’s tongue, because he didn’t snap right back with the screamingly obvious questions: “Oh, but I was under the impression that you justified paying for her expenses on the grounds that she would be working for this project? If she’s not going to be working for this project, then why is the Italian side of the project financing her course and why did you want the Community Chest Fund to bankroll her expenses? Just for fun?”

Darleen Zerafa (centre) and Lydia Abela (right): as Mick Jagger once sang, ‘Under my thumb’

A few days ago, I put up a post called ‘Is Darleen Zerafa paying for her course? The thought just occurred to me that she might not be.’ The link is below.

I’d thought about the situation for a few minutes, and realised it made no sense at all to conclude that Ms Zerafa is paying for her own course when she has been selected for the job, without a call for applications, by the Community Chest Fund in liaison with the Italian clinic.

In a situation like that, the anointed candidate would be trained at the expense of the organisation – and no, not the charity, because this is unacceptable for all the reasons recently outlined, but the academy/clinic.

And it turns out that my rationale was correct, because the President confirmed earlier this evening on TVHemm that yes, Darleen Zerafa is not paying for the course herself, after all, but the Italians are picking up the bill.

So they still managed to wangle it for free, and this over and above the fact that she has been handpicked for the job of working for the eating disorders centre that has yet to be set up by the Community Chest Fund.

Really, it’s not what you know but who you know. Look what you can get for yourself if your sister is married to the President’s son: a salaried job as palace courtier (lady-in-waiting to the First Lady), plenty of influence in the Community Chest Fund as secretary to the board and PA to its deputy chairman (the First Lady), free training in the management of eating disorders, and then a salaried position, obtained uncompetitively and through anointment, at the eating disorders clinic being set up by the charity which you serve as secretary to the board.

This is just so unbelievable. Perhaps Nestor Laiviera and Julia Farrugia would like to take it up and ring the President’s office 10 times a day with questions about how Darleen Zerafa got her job? They’ll know exactly what I mean, even if my readers don’t.

Hey, Franco – always assuming you haven’t been castrated – that’s another word for neutered – by your car, driver, salary and Importanza – this is what an oligarchy really is. Get onto it, will you.

The President of Malta – and I purposely do not say ‘George Abela’ – is on TVM right now, being quizzed along with a couple of others, by Norman Vella on TVHemm.

When I switched on, he was in the process of defending Darleen Zerafa, his wife’s paid personal assistant (she is a pharmacist, but works as the First Lady’s PA, God bless her) and his daughter-in-law Lydia’s sister.

First he heaped enormous praise on her, then he explained in great detail why he thought she should have received Community Chest Fund money to cover her course expenses in Italy, then he spoke in awe of her refusal to take the money.

When men, whoever they are, speak of a woman, whoever she is, in tones of the Beata Paola, sounding in awe of a paragon cross between the Virgin Mother, Florence Nightingale and the subject of a pre-Raphaelite painting, they plummet in my esteem – even if there was any to begin with – right through a hole in the floor.

Few men look as pathetic and foolish, whoever they are, as those who publicly and patently eat out of the hand of a manipulative woman, whoever she might be, who is transparently (to other women at least; men tend to be blind to these operations) playing the part of a goo-goo-eyed heroic saint for his benefit, when so many other people can see that they are led by the nose.

This is the President’s real problem at the moment: not that he offered that charity money to Darleen Zerafa, so much as that he appears to have fallen under the undue influence of a couple of soft-spoken manipulative sisters with a will of iron and an eye on the main chance, who have come into his sphere through the marriage of one of them to his son.

If Lydia Abela, Darleen’s sister, were a decent woman, she would have dissuaded her husband, the President’s son, from taking to the stage at a mass meeting in the electoral campaign, and still more would she have dissuaded him from insulting Lawrence Gonzi into a microphone before a crowd of tens of thousands.

She would have said to him, “Don’t do it. Lawrence Gonzi is the very man who behaved so well towards your father, made him President, and made it possible for us to baptise our child in the Verdala Castle chapel and leave a marble plaque marking the occasion in the castle grounds, for posterity. It would be ill-mannered, indecent and wrong to insult him in public, and why would you want to insult him anyway?”

That was her duty as his wife, but Lydia Abela is a Labour Party official and she has an agenda and her own career advancement to think of.

I think it might well have been Lydia Abela who instigated her husband to behave so badly in the first place, far from even trying to dissuade him from his own idea.

Those Zerafa sisters seem to have the presidential family under their thumb, what with one of them married to the president’s son and another one literally installed in the palace bedroom as lady-in-waiting (that’s what the first lady’s PA really is), and secretary to the Community Chest Fund board.

Now we have the President demeaning himself by appearing on an early evening television interview show to defend himself and Darleen.

It’s not the show itself that’s demeaning – it’s one of the best on television usually, but tonight it’s absolutely terrible, with none of the right questions asked and a complete whitewash job done on the President and Darleen.

No, it’s the fact that he debased his position by behaving like any old politician who goes on television in that context to justify himself and his actions.

Norman Vella should have grilled him over hot coals – there were so many questions to be asked, so many inconsistencies to be pointed out – but he didn’t. Let’s face it, when the President has got to the stage where he’s being grilled on television about his actions and intentions (even if the grilling is more of a mere white-toasting on setting number 1), it’s time to say goodbye.

This is our HEAD OF STATE we’re talking about. He’s the equivalent, for what it’s worth, of the Queen. Can you imagine the Queen sitting on a sofa on a BBC show defending her actions before Jeremy Paxman? That’s right, it just doesn’t happen.

George Abela has treated the presidency like a job, not a state role.

We had such high expectations of this president – I certainly was one who did – but instead of rising to the occasion he dragged the whole thing down with him, or allowed himself to be dragged down by his rabidly ambitious hangers-on.

The Department of Information has just informed the press that the formal dinner hosted by the Prime Minister tonight at Villa Francia will actually take place later than planned.

This is how they informed the press, who are expected to cover the ‘meet and greet’ part of the evening: ‘Change in time’.

How did they inform the guests – by ringing them up and telling them, “Please come later because the host can’t make it at the time he gave you”?

In any case, what can possibly have happened here? Did the PM discover a more fascinating subsequent engagement of the Don Draper variety (most unlikely), or does Mrs Muscat need more time to get her hair wrapped up in one of those up-dos tat-tigijiet ta’ nies ta’ certu tip after getting the children organised with the baby-sitter?

I despair.

From: Press Releases at OPM [mailto:press.releases@gov.mt]
Sent: 20 May 2013 13:57
Subject: DOI – Press Cov Change in Time

Monday 20th May 2013

Villa Francia, Lija.

The leader of the Labour Party visited the new PN leader today at the latter’s HQ. The Times of Malta reports:

Muscat calls on Busuttil at PN headquarters – leaders call for less aggressive political media
Parties to hold meetings every two months

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and Opposition leader Simon Busuttil have agreed that their two parties should hold open-agenda meetings every two months.

Dr Busuttil said he was ready to contribute to making politics a positive experience, adding he was willing to see the party media “calm down”.

(…)

I am so unimpressed. The Labour Party’s viciously malevolent – not merely aggressive – media are its single most valuable weapon in the battle to gain and maintain power, given that neither policy nor ability are on its side.

Over the years, it has concentrated more of its money and efforts in developing its media weapons of warfare and using them for a full-scale ceaseless assault that ran like a constant electoral campaign between one election and another, than in developing policy and politicians.

Also, the sort of people who are magnetically attracted to Labour are the kind who love that brand of malevolence and who are vulnerable to its negative seduction.

Just look at the last five years of conversations you have had and those you have overheard to see evidence of this: endless numbers of people, even supposedly intelligence ones, repeating Super One lies and propaganda, sometimes even at at several removes and without having any idea that they are parroting Super One.

With the rampant aggression of Super One, the Labour Party would not have been able to build that ‘zieda ta’ hames mitt euro’, scrapped in 2009 and all the money refunded, into a major electoral issue four years later.

That is just one example of hundreds.

There is no way the Labour Party is going to give up this weapon or make it any less aggressive. Instead it will carry on becoming more and more aggressive even as its consummate paranoia increases, oblivious to the fact that attacking individuals viciously when you are the party in Opposition is one thing (though bad enough already), but attacking them relentlessly when you are the party in government is a violation of democratic norms associated with totalitarian regimes.

But still they will do it, and get worse, because they are demonstrably paranoid.

As for the PN-owned media, they have never been aggressive. Their main problem has long been far too much timidity and mealy-mouthed tiptoeing around issues precisely because of this very fear of being the party in government that is ‘attacking’ individuals. So instead they went to the other extreme, with even actual news reportage suffering the effects of too much niceness.

And look what happened. The Vile Machine won the battle against the Nice Machine.

There were other reasons, but believe me (as somebody who’s been out here scrutinising the whole thing for my sins), that’s the main one.

Everywhere I went, I would hear the most surprising people parroting Super One, and Malta Today, and they would even say things like, “But it’s true; I heard it on television/read it in the newspaper” without making any distinction between which television or what newspaper.

Incidentally, I disagree with those who say that Simon Busuttil is too soft and that he is being too nice to Muscat – there are comments to this effect in respect of this visit and Muscat’s reception there.

I think Busuttil is more likely to be fixing on lulling Muscat into accepting an invitation to dinner, so to speak, and then doing a Borgia on him. I speak, of course, metaphorically. I also think that Muscat is well aware of this, and knows through experience that he is now dealing with a very different character and personality type.

Muscat’s joke tal-hamalli (there’s no other word for it, it was such poor taste and such appalling manners) to Busuttil about Lawrence Gonzi being the predecessor they have in common (“taghna lkoll”) may have been met with a smile for the cameras, but that smile was edged with frost – a civilised response to highly uncivilised behaviour.

It’s the frost beneath the smile that you have to look at, and not the smile on the surface. Muscat knows that, and it unnerves him already. Prepare yourself for more awkward jokes by Muscat in the face of Busuttil’s composure and inscrutable facial expression. These will be interesting times, in the Chinese meaning.

Back in July, the woman caught spying for Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party and sacked by her employers RTK (the Catholic radio station), in the case of the ‘flirtatious’ emails, lamented on Facebook:

Sabrina Agius
It’s not what you know and how much you know…it’s who you know…
19 July at 14:08

Ethelbert Schembri
Very sad but true !
19 July at 14:19

Sabrina Agius
Unfortunately it’s a REALITY…however at times you just don’t expect it reigns within certain insittutions

Fast forward to May 2013, and Sabrina Agius has a job in the secretariat for hunting and trapping, as spokeswoman for Parliamentary Secretary Roderick Galdes.

Careful there, Roderick – she might be a double-agent, working for the finches.

Malta’s prime minister. Believe it. True, we haven’t seen him for some time, but maybe he’s busy lining up the Thermos flasks.

When people feel they are under siege, they begin to concentrate on their paranoia and can’t operate normally. This government has behaved with paranoia from day one, when it executed all the permanent secretaries and put the head of the civil service to the firing squad, then demanded the resignations of all chairmen, CEOs and directors of state corporations and even public authorities.

Since then it has adopted one of two approaches to those it considers its enemies.

1. The neutering approach, which is to appear to be offering the hand of friendship to those it considers most vulnerable to such approaches, as a prelude to wiping them out. This is the equivalent of inviting your enemy to dinner and then poisoning him once he is seated at your table thinking ‘Wow, this is great.’ It is a tactic as old as history, with different methods of elimination used as appropriate.

2. The menacing approach, coupled with harassment – this is the method which will be used with those real and perceived enemies of the Labour Party who refuse to accept invitations to the table (ma jridux jahdmu maghna) because they know that supping with the devil requires a long spoon or, at the very least, a personal food-taster. Ostensibly legal means will be used to harass and menace individuals, who are left with no means to defend them and powerless to seek redress. It was a system Labour of the 1970s and 1980s used to greatly deleterious effect, even creating laws, systems and regulations that allowed them to harass and target individuals with the law on their side, even though the spirit of those laws breached every democratic value and in many instances, also human rights.

These lines from L-Orizzont’s (the newspaper that claims Ronnie Pellegrini is one of its reporters) leading article today sum up the paranoia and siege mentality, when Labour has been in government for a mere, piddling two months. They speak about the dangers of leaving ‘enemies of the state’ – I use that term with all its Soviet implications – in positions of trust.

wisq probabbli qed juzaw il-karigi li thallew f’idejhom u l-poteri li ghandhom biex jissoktaw bil-komplotti, il-pjani fini u l-istrategiji fis-satra halli hekk kif tfegg xi opportunita favorevoli ghalihom u/jew ghall-PN, jergghu johorgu fil-berah l-armi l-kbar

With this level of suspicion and paranoia expressed openly by the Labour media, no wonder the Cabinet is removing everyone across the board, forbidding mobile phones at meetings, and so on.

And no wonder, too, that Joseph Muscat has holed himself up in his ivory tower and is rarely seen in public. Any moment now and he will start doing what his hero Dom Mintoff used to do, and cooking his own food in hotel rooms, only accepting invitations to official functions (or other public dining) if the food is shared by all at a buffet, and carrying a Thermos flask around with him with his own hot drinks, made by himself, even at the Auberge de Castille.

Oh, didn’t you know that this is what Mintoff did, because he was so scared of being poisoned? Well, now you do.

In Egypt, two journalists who critcised President Morsi are to stand trial for criminal defamation. The case has made the world news after being reported by Reuters and other news agencies this morning.

This is because true democracies understand the implications of having politicians use the police/criminal defamation trials against journalists who criticise them.

If a politician truly feels aggrieved and thinks something is libellous, he shouldn’t resort to the police, but file a civil suit. The implications of using the police go way beyond the attainment of justice.

I just cannot understand why so many people fail to grasp this in Malta, even as they po-facedly note the fact that whenever there are criminal defamation suits instigated by politicians against journalists, in places with oppressive regimes where democracy and freedom of speech are under threat, the news agencies report them and they make the international headlines.

Are any statistics kept in Malta on the numbers of cases involving politicians using the police to go after journalists?

Read it again:

tista’ ma taqbilx magħna, iżda tista’ taħdem magħna

And again:

tista’ ma taqbilx magħna, iżda tista’ taħdem magħna

Once more:

tista’ ma taqbilx magħna, iżda tista’ taħdem magħna

Now spot the flaw in that reasoning – or rather, the threat implicit in that statement, which you probably missed in the euphoria of the election campaign, and in the immediate electoral aftermath.

Maltese makes no distinction between ‘can’ and ‘may’, which makes this statement even more ambiguously sinister.

You can/may disagree with us, but you can/may work with us.

The threat implicit in that statement is this: we have said we will work with you, therefore if you refuse to work with us you have declared war on us and that leaves us free to declare war on you.

The statement itself is morally wrong because it does not take cognizance of the fact that nobody in his right mind (and certainly nobody principled) wants to work with people with whom he fundamentally disagrees, doing things he fundamentally disagrees with.

It is nothing short of an invitation to acts of amoral pragmatism, the sort of behaviour Muscat and those who surround him take for granted as normal, purely for the sake of survival.

The message embedded in that statement will be new to younger people. It is not new to others, who can already feel the beginnings of the return of the atmosphere of malevolence, fear and negativity that permeated the 1970s and 1980s, when people routinely lived their lives with a knot of tension in their stomach, wondering when the next thing would come out of left field to harrow their days, leaving them powerless to defend themselves.

There a disturbance in Valletta’s St Paul Street this morning when a car parked on the pavement jammed up all incoming traffic.

The police arrived, and Transport Malta personnel lifted the car further to the side so that the traffic could get through.

Displayed on the windscreen is a police permit issued to journalists, allowing them to “park in restricted areas in exceptional emergency cases when on official journalistic duties only” (incidentally, I don’t have one of those).

The individual is listed on the permit as one Ronnie Pellegrini, a journalist employed with Union Print Co Ltd. Union Print is the General Workers Union’s publishing arm, publishers of It-Torca and L-Orizzont.

Ronnie Pellegrini is employed with the General Workers Union as an official of some sort, but he is definitely not a journalist and he does not work for L-Orizzont and It-Torca.

He is a very close friend of Valletta 2018 chairman Jason Micallef and he spends rather a lot of time hanging about with the Super One crowd and the young people at Forum Zghazagh Laburisti despite being in his late 50s. Maybe he sees himself as a sort of political mentor.

In the Golden Eighties, he was Lorry Sant’s chief sidekick, fixer and henchman, and stuck by him even after the 1987 change in government.

I’d say he knows exactly what was in that brown envelope with which Lorry Sant tried to blackmail the Mintoffs around 1992.

What nice people we’ve got calling the shots now – my, my, my.

I imagine that Toni Abela, Labour’s deputy leader, wasn’t the only one who found a pulizija Laburist. Ronnie Pellegrini must have found one too, to get that strict-issue permit when he doesn’t qualify for it.

Oh, and did you notice? It expired last January and he hasn’t bothered to renew, presumably because he can now park on the pavement wherever he likes, even when not reporting on a major crime scene for L-Orizzont.

In any case, that isn’t Ronnie Pellegrini’s car. He drives a smart, new BMW.

The Times today carries a story about a man who laments the fact that, 29 years after his elderly mother was knocked down on a zebra crossing in front of several witnesses on a June evening in Hamrun, dragged for a kilometre by the hit-and-run driver, and left for dead, he still does not know who did it because the police never found the person involved.

Oh, I’ll bet they did. Many people saw the car. This was 1984. What probably did happen is that they found the driver (or, at least, the owner of the car) and thought it best to let ‘investigations’ stop right there.

That’s the way things happened back then, in Karmenu Vella’s legendary Golden Years.

That same year, I went to the Valletta police station to file a report against the driver of car X, number plate Y, who was parked in the middle of the road on Merchant Street, outside the Foreign Ministry, leaning out of the window and bantering with Alex Sceberras Trigona’s (he was then foreign minister) thugs, indifferent to the other drivers waiting behind him.

Those drivers included me, right behind him. When I put my hand on the horn and asked him to get a move on, he put his car into reverse and rammed mine, smashing the front, then sped off.

When I went to the police with my report, the sergeant at the desk was all alacrity until he looked up the number-plate. Then he blanched. “Look,” he said, “for your own safety and ours I’m not even going to write down your report, because we won’t be able to proceed on it anyway, and you’ll end up with a bomb on your doorstep. That was X, a notorious criminal. Just drop it. Even if you want to proceed, we won’t allow you.”

I’d say much the same thing happened with that poor woman’s death, except that because there was such a horrible death involved, the victim’s son wasn’t given the name of the perpetrator, as I was for something much less serious and because that particular sergeant was concerned for my safety besides his own.

I dropped it – it was only a car bumper, and I was 19. But you don’t drop it when what’s involved is the horrid death of your parent. Had that woman’s children been given the name of the driver, they would have insisted on pursuing the case. I’d say the police had the name, but kept it under wraps and hoped the problem would go away, which it did – for them, but not for her children.