Other guests included Silvio Parnis, parliamentary secretary for local government and communities, businessman and former owner of Global Capital Chris Pace, who now owns an estate agency, and Ivan Portelli, a former policeman who was sacked from the force in 1999 for associating with suspected smugglers under investigation by the police (he continues to associate with one of them until today), and who was appointed Director of Operations at the VAT Department by the incoming Labour government in 2013. He has since been taken off those responsibilities and made Director/Administration at the Inland Revenue Department instead.

Today, at the time of publication of this post, the Planning Authority is in session to decide whether to sanction Mr Cutajar’s illegal zoo or not. UPDATE: The Planning Authority has decided to sanction the illegal development and zoo operation despite objections from NGOs.

Mr Cutajar, whose father Joseph is the mayor of Birzebbuga and was also a Labour Party candidate on the Fifth District in this year’s general election, has been expanding and operating his zoo with what appears to be complete immunity to the law, advertising its services – which include having your picture taken with big cat cubs – and socialising routinely with the Prime Minister, who he describes in Facebook posts as his greatest friend, with the Prime Minister’s wife, with the government’s head of communications Kurt Farrugia, and with Economy Minister and Labour Party deputy leader Chris Cardona.

Two years ago, I published this post. Not long after that, I rang Mr Cutajar to ask him to confirm or deny reports that I had received that the Prime Minister had been a guest at his illegal zoo premises, saying to him that the Prime Minister’s car had been noted parked outside by somebody walking their dog. Mr Cutajar denied it, becoming hostile and aggressive.

The Prime Minister is the cabinet member directly responsible for land-use planning and for the Planning Authority.

Shortly afterwards he rang back, apologised for his hostility, and thanked me for calling him to confirm before publication. He also referred back to my post in which I asked where he gets the money for his fast cars, extensive land and large number of big cats which cost a daily fortune to feed and maintain, given that he has no obvious source of income, no family money and is barely literate.

He explained that he makes his money through a highly lucrative business which breeds big cats like lions, leopards and tigers in captivity for export to the Gulf States, where they are prized as status symbols by sheikhs and other potentates.

This website was unable to ascertain whether this business is registered in Malta or not, and whether the cubs bred in Mr Cutajar’s illegal zoo in Siggiewi are among those exported to the Gulf as status symbols for sheikhs.

At Capo Crudo restaurant yesterday, celebrating owner Keith Seychell’s birthday: the Environment Minister and Mrs Jose Herrera (3rd and 4th from left), Keith Seychell, Parliamentary Secretary Silvio Parnis, businessman Chris Pace (5th, 6th and 7th from left), Anton Rea Cutajar (1st on right) and Ivan Portelli, former director of operations at the VAT Department and now director/administration at the Inland Revenue and his wife Samantha Portelli Warne (2nd and 3rd on right).

Anton Rea Cutajar with two rare white cubs of the sort which fetch a premium price in the Gulf.

Not even tiger cubs are safe from being pawed by the Minister for the Economy and deputy leader of the Labour Party.

Anton Rea Cutajar with his father, the Labour mayor of Birzebbuga, who was also a Labour Party candidate in the last general election.

Anton Rea Cutajar(third from left) with the government head of communications, Kurt Farrugia (second from left).

With Mrs Muscat, the Prime Minister’s wife, who Anton Rea Cutajar describes as “the Queen”.

The rentals market has been distorted not because people are applying to buy Maltese citizenship, but because those applying to buy citizenship have no intention of living in the flats they rent, and because the government set a minimum rent threshold but not a floor-area threshold or a quality threshold.

This means that millionaires and even billionaires who apply to buy Maltese citizenship and who need to fulfil the obligation of renting an address for five years, are paying thousands of euros a month to rent squalid basements and flats in side-streets – because they are just paying for the address, and don’t need something suitable in which to live. The flats stay empty for five years.

If they actually had to live in the flats they rent, they would rent at the top end of the market and the flats in side-streets and basements would command a true market price and be rented to people who actually need to live in them.

So if it’s all the same to the foreign millionaires and billionaires, why aren’t they paying thousands a month for top-end flats at good Maltese addresses? The answer is that they probably think that they are, because they never get to see the place, and in any case, they don’t care. They don’t need a flat. They need an address to fulfil a contractual obligation.

Meanwhile, people on an average income who cannot take out a loan to buy their own home and so must rent – like the nurse who is separated from her husband and supporting three children, and who gave an interview to a newspaper some days ago – are being forced out by landlords who want to rent for a high, false price to citizenship applicants who will never set foot across the threshold.

And it’s affecting the ability of employers in Malta to recruit people from overseas, too – because many of those young people who come over to Malta to work in remote gaming and financial services are being priced out of the rental market by landlords who would rather make more money by letting out their low-end flats as fake addresses for citizenship and now also ‘golden residence visa’ applicants.

Mrs Muscat relaxes on a working day at a high-end beach club while her supposedly Socialist husband implements policies which price single mothers, young people and struggling nurses out of the rentals market because Russian billionaires are allowed to pretend that they live in basement flats with one window.

And I hope that Christian Kalin of Henley & Partners is watching, too, because some days ago he was talking about the “remote possibility” of the Nationalist Party winning the general election, as he closed a deal with “Keith and Joseph” to sell another few thousand Maltese citizenships/EU passports.

That possibility is looking less remote by the minute, not even the day. Even if Muscat wins, how is he going to survive this anger?

Thirty-six thousand votes are a hell of a lot in the Maltese context. Muscat could have haemorrhaged 35,000 of those votes – and that would be rising fury we are seeing around us – but it would still leave him a thousand to play with, and he only needs a single vote to win.

But the situation now isn’t what it was only four weeks ago. Over the course of the campaign there’s been a quite noticeable shift against Muscat and his henchmen, with mounting anger and openly expressed contempt. People who had boasted about voting for him in 2013 are now saying publicly that they’re going to vote against him, that they’re shocked, let down, dismayed, disgusted.

Young people – who had so obviously deserted the Nationalist Party in 2013 and were nowhere to be seen at mass meetings and public events (supporting the Nationalists was then akin to having a disease) are now flocking in their droves to PN meetings, wrapped in the flag like it’s 2003, and actually crowding to be right there in the front row for the cameras.

Even Simon Busuttil’s loudest and nastiest detractors have now fallen silent on that score as his popularity goes through the roof: the clean, honest man with the clean, honest girlfriend, the polar opposites of the avaricious and tacky couple who have made the crowd’s blood boil in anger.

And as this happens, Muscat – who started the campaign with his standard cocky attitude and smug arrogance – has been visibly shrinking rapidly. The cockiness has gone. Instead of shooting sarcastic tu quoque retorts at journalists, he now avoids them altogether, unless they are friendly ones who can be stage-managed, like Reno Bugeja and Saviour Balzan on TVM.

Quite frankly, I think he’s at a loss as to how to cope in the face of the general opprobrium. For the whole nine years since he became party leader, Muscat has been celebrated on a cloud of glory. All his public communications, his style, everything, have been perfected in the context of real and anticipated admiration.

The annoying only son of doting older parents, who has been accustomed from birth to being the centre of attention for adults in whose eyes he could do no wrong, and who admired his every move and word, reached his 40s in a similar situation, always placing himself in contexts where he would shine, largely because there was no competition – for example, politics in the Labour Party, and journalism at Maltastar and Super One.

Now, for the first time in his life and as late as his mid-40s, he has experienced the shock of public contempt. Why, people don’t admire me! They want me to get out of their faces! They’re counting the days until they can vote me out! The people who swarmed around me are now making no secret of the fact that they’re swarming around Simon! The election hasn’t arrived yet and what’s this, people are treating me like the loser! Four years ago they were sucking up to Michelle at Girgenti, and now they’re laughing at her and her Valentino Rock Studs and saying how greedy she is and how tacky!

Muscat cannot deal, either psychologically or in practical terms, with the anger of the public. He probably senses that if this were not Malta in 2017, there would be large crowd bearing pitchforks outside the Villa Francia, and more pitchforks surging up the stairs of the Auberge de Castille with the express purpose of defenestrating him, Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and Kurt Farrugia, that Glenn Bedingfield would be turning on a spit in a public square, with a view to providing a week’s food for labourers.

This, and not fear, is probably the reason Muscat has been avoiding all public appearances which cannot be stage-managed, and has even ducked out of interviews, including the ‘statutory’ Broadcasting Authority televised press conference with the party leaders, which has been a general election fixture for decades. He cannot cope with the fact that he no longer has the upper hand.

But still, I don’t know. It FEELS like he should lose, but as with Brexit and Trump, we have to factor in the silence of those who are too embarrassed to say that they will vote for the ‘shameful’ option.

In my experience, it’s rarely fear which stops people saying how they will vote, but more often embarrassment, even of themselves and anonymous pollsters. With everyone saying how corrupt Muscat is and how he is running a criminal outfit and not a government, how do you announce, at the dinner-table or a cocktail party, that you’re planning on voting for him?

Evita Peron – clearly the model for Mrs Muscat’s outfit and approach

Who’s going to pay for her clothes addiction if her Spouse is voted out of office? Let’s hope they’ve managed to launder enough money to pay for her ever-changing wardrobe of costumes, because 92 euros doesn’t buy much these days, and nobody is going to want to lease that old Alfa.

Correction: it has been destroyed in one term in government, after having been over very many years, including the very EU membership he fought against and which he is now selling passports to.

As for his wife, apologies, SPOUSE – she’s beyond belief. “With him you can be who you are,” she says – as though this is somehow politically relevant or the general election is about electing a prime minister with whom people can be themselves. I suppose it’s because with him she can be who she is that she has changed her face completely.

And they actually say “Muscat has the respect of the whole of Europe” – oh, of course, and how. That would be why he is smeared across the pages of newspapers across the continent for a variety of scandalous reasons. Besides which, Europe is transfixed in admiration for the way he has handled the presidency of the European Council with such delightful smoothness and so much attention to the matters on the table.

The spouse’s new face in this just-published government propaganda video, in which she says: “With him you can be who you are”. So that would be why she felt she had to change her face, then.