Whatever happened to Anthony Zammit?
Published:
October 3, 2008 at 7:13pm
He’s gone quiet, hasn’t he? I wonder whether he’s lying alone in a bedroom somewhere, all tied up and with nobody to find him. There’s been a remarkable silence after that big shoot-my-mouth-off interview he gave The Times straight after he was – ahem – tied up and burgled. You’d have thought the police would have got to the bottom of it by now, what with all the names and details he gave them. I think we have a right to know what all the fuss was about. Time for another interview, don’t you think? Otherwise we’re going to have a hard time taking him seriously when he’s Joseph Muscat’s minister for health.
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How come you remembered Zammit right after the previous article on vocabulary and expressions regarding the ins and outs of …
Funny how the story just went off the radar screens. He claimed to recognize one of those who assaulted him too…
Another story that seems to have gone off the radar screens is the prosecution of former Chief Justice Noel Arrigo who was caught taking a bribe from a convicted drug dealer. That was 6 years ago. For some the wheels of justice grind very very slowly.
why dont you just leave the poor guy alone?
[Daphne – You have a point. He’s been tied up once too often recently.]
This sad story ended the way one expected it to end. In my opinion, Times interview or no interview, the entire episode is a very personal matter and should be put to rest. “Al buon intenditor poche parole”.
[Daphne – That depends on whether he persists in his ambition to become minister for health. All I can say is that he appears to have the personality problems of a Sandro Schembri Adami character – though, I hasten to add, I don’t mean the embezzlement and the fraud, but just the weakness that leads to some very odd attention-seeking behaviour. And Labour is always so glad to have a pulit on its books that it doesn’t look carefully enough.]
Gerald, you of all people should appreciate that when someone courts publicity as Zammit, pretty stupidly in the circumstances, did, then he’s only got himself to blame if the media follow up on it.
[Daphne – Don’t bet on it. Gerald is best known for having reviewed a concert – slagging off the pianist and rubbishing the whole thing – when it then transpired that he had never even been there. The conclusion follows naturally, if illogically: now wonder he likes Joseph Muscat….]
@Andrew Borg Cardona
The media did not follow this up. It’s only Daphne who brings it up every now and then in this blog for the amusement of her fan base – including yourself of course. As far as I know blogs such as this do not pass as media.
Please do not come up with the retort that internet, like television, is the medium.
[Daphne – Please don’t be tiresome. Do you honestly think that somebody who is trying to become health minister in the next government, who made such great political xenati and sought so much attention for the purpose of attracting votes in the last general election campaign, can do something like that and expect people to say nothing? The scandal is not what he is sitting on, nor the fact that I ‘bring it up in this blog’. The scandal is that not one newspaper sees fit to follow up the story – not even Malta Today, which hunted the former police commissioner into the ground for making the stupid mistake of having an affair with a vengeful narcissist. This is what really gets me: heterosexual sex is considered grounds for public scandal and reams of newspaper coverage, but homosexual sex? Hands off, lest people think we’re homophobic. Come off it, will you? Do you really want somebody who lies like this, and who wastes police time to save his ‘image’ (messing it up instead) in your Labour cabinet?]
Yesterday’s Times reports MTA director claiming he authorised his secretary to sign a sensitive report on his behalf without having seen it. Others review a concert they haven’t attended. No wonder some people claim they are super-performers and workaholics! They’re so pragmatic and practical. The rest are just work-by-the-book bureaucrats, and if they have to chip in an extra couple of hours after work as a matter of course its because they don’t work smart. After all the signature on a document is only meant to decorate. One in a thousand may cause some minor inconvenience along these lines:
Mr Attard said that after being interrogated by the police on the matter he was mentally exhausted and did not want to read the report because he feared that it contained “something out of this world”. However, on reading it he was surprised because everything was in order.
enlighten me please – was he tied up with furry handcuffs or what?
[Daphne – Not that we know of. It would have been hard to claim that the robbers did it if he were.]
@ Anthony
I fully concur with what you said. However, I must pinpoint a mistake; a grammatical one. The proverb you did employ is said as follows: A buon intenditor, poche parole. Dai, ora non te la prendere però eh :)
Thanks Daphne for bringing that concert up – it shows that people never forget mistakes and are ready to bring out the knives whenever its appropriate. Thankfully I’ve moved on quite a bit since then.
For correctness’ sake, I did not rubbish the pianist and as you very well know, I paid dearly for that error. And if you think that these below the belt stabs will stop me from posting my opinion on this and other blogs then you are mistaken.
@ABC: Yes, the media should follow such a story up but i suppose it’s in the journalist’s interest to chase the story so if nothing has been published yet, I suppose that no one cared to follow it up.
Now wonder he likes Joseph Muscat? what does that actually mean?
[Daphne – Gerald, Maltese usage allows ‘zbal’ to be used for deliberate acts of wrong-doing, which reflects our mentality. You can’t do the same with English and use the word ‘mistake’ to describe an act in which you sat down and disparaged a concert you were asked to review, when you were elsewhere at the time. That’s not a mistake. Yes, I agree you have moved on and will probably never do something so damaging again. I’m not trying to stop you posting your opinion here. There’s a much simpler way for me to do that: deleting your comments. This is not a public service, but my own privately-owned thing. But I haven’t done that, have I? As for your last question, it was a reference to dubious judgement.]
Am I missing something here? Was this a break-in or some kinky role-play game gone awry? If it was the latter, then why would someone so well-known create such an attention-grabbing tale?
[Daphne – That’s what we’d all like to know…except for Ray Borg, who would like to know only if it involved a Nationalist minister and his bit on the side.]
Daphne
You are incurable. You see scandals everywhere where your ‘enemies’ are concerned. The mainstream media did not pick this story up because they were prudent and correct. You let your fertile imagination run wild and concocted a story based on assumptions and not facts just to have a shot at a Labour MP.
AS expected, you had a completely diferent attitude about the Gozo rape case where the brothers of a Nationalist junior minister are allegedly involved. If you read to-day’s Times you must know that this case is taking a pretty nasty curve. Waiting to hear from you on this one too.
[Daphne – I think you must mean incorrigible. And no, I don’t see scandals everywhere. I am, in fact, not even remotely interested in other people’s private lives. The point at issue is not what Anthony Zammit was doing in his bedroom, but how he handled the matter: calling the police, making a big fuss about having been burgled, and then giving a massive interview about the ‘drama’, with a great deal of detail except, one imagines, the most salient information of all. Had he not done that, I wouldn’t have cared less. But he went out of his way to draw attention to himself, and there is reason to believe that he may have lied to the police and to journalists. If his behaviour is all right by you, then it’s not all right by me. It is not because of ‘prudence and correctness’ that the ‘mainstream media’ failed to pick up the story. It is due to apathy and reluctance to prise open a very large can of worms. I think I know a bit more about the mainstream media than you do, given that it’s the field in which I have worked for the last two decades or so. I did not concoct a story based on assumptions: I based myself on the facts as reported in the mainstream media and as described by Zammit himself. You would have to be very naive indeed to draw any other conclusion. How odd, though, that you sound exactly like a man who is having an affair, telling his wife that she is crazy for thinking he is having an affair (“you let your fertile imagination run wild and concocted a story based on assumptions and not facts….etc etc etc”…I did NOT have sex with that woman).
Far from my having a different attitude to the Gozo rape case, this blog was the first, and for many days the only, form of published media to report that three of the rapists are brothers to parliamentary secretary Chris Said. Scroll back, and you’ll find it. The big mistake you make is in failing to distinguish between what a politician does, and what his siblings do. It wasn’t Chris Said who raped that girl, but it was Anthony Zammit who told us he had been tied up and ‘robbed’. At least we know that the ‘tied up’ bit was true, because that’s how they found him. You’re such a Labour apologist, it’s unbelievable what you’ll excuse.]
It was a serious error granted but one must move on I suppose. why not start a discussion on energy tariffs as this issue of Prof Zammit rather seems to be a diversion to take us away from the real problems facing the country?
LOL – So DCG is now the Nationalists’ panis et circensis, eh? Ray and Gerald have obviously not read about the DCG/De Marco fracas.
I am surprised how everybody seems to be pointing an accusing finger at the press for not bringing this story up. I believe that it is the police force that owe us an update on what actually happened. They have the name and nickname of one of the aggressors and if after some weeks they have not managed to arrest anybody, then this is very scary. Unless of course they know who the culprits are and have been told to hush things up.
Your last line hit the nail on the head, Edgar.
[Daphne – Look, I’ll just call the police communications office on Monday.]
Actually there were some developments shortly after the “brutal hold-up” as L-Orizzont described it.
Acting on Mr Zammit’s indications the police arrested two men who go by the nicknames ‘Ghandi’ and ‘Ronny’ but it turned out they had nothing to do with the case. The police now think that the false nicknames were made up by the thieves so that Mr Zammit would hear them and derail the investigations.
Unfortunately the CCTV cameras were not useful either as the shots were too cloudy (must have been a foggy night at Zabbug).
Curiously, as far as I know, only L-Orizzont reported these updates in any detail.
http://www.l-orizzont.com/news.asp?newsitemid=46739
http://www.l-orizzont.com/news.asp?newsitemid=46974
In a country where people especially politicians try to justify anything, its good to see Gerald being gentlemanly about his mistake and not bringing up excuses. Best of luck to him. That’s quite in contrast with MTA director trying to justify his actions in court earlier this week
@ Gerald No wonder he likes Joseph Muscat? what does that actually mean?
Oh Gerald don’t worry. Nobody is putting your hetrosexuality in doubt, far from it. Don’t be paranoid. we know that you do not have a certain lifestyle.
It’s only your judgement which is questionable. In fact I am curious to know which biz paper he works for.
[Daphne – The Malta Economic Update.]