Hmmm, fresh questions about the provenance of that mouse-skull
I don’t know what the people at Papillon Caterers are supposed to have done, but somebody really has it in for them. First the mouse-head chaos, and now this. Or maybe the two cases are related. If somebody paid these people to vote, then maybe somebody else could pay them to testify. There’s a great, big, huge question-mark over the credibility of anyone who is not embarrassed to say that he took EUR200 in exchange for his vote, whether that’s true or not. Even more amusing is the case of the girl with the funny name, who said that she had been told how to vote, and when asked for whom she voted, said: “The Nationalists. I was going to vote for them anyway.”
Are we serious here?
With Anglu Farrugia’s reasoning, every single politician in this country should be prosecuted, because they all tell us how to vote, and that Armageddon will be personally delivered to our door if we don’t follow their advice. I imagine that I should be arrested, too. How many times have I told you all how to vote?
Let’s see now. One of these ‘witnesses’ said that he was told he would be fired unless he voted Nationalist and took a picture, using his mobile phone, of his ballot-sheet. He did exactly as he was told, he says, but then he was fired all the same. I wonder why, just as I wonder why he rushed straight to Anglu Farrugia to grind his axe after being let go. Call me a cynic, but the way I see it, somebody who fails to understand the implications of selling his vote (and for a pittance) is unlikely to understand the implications of lying about it under oath.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Witnesses say they were threatened, told how to vote
Two employees of Papillon Caterers told a court today that they had been instructed and threatened over how to vote at the general elections by their employer Pierre Bartolo. They gave evidence when the Criminal Court started hearing proceedings against Mr Bartolo, 44 of Swieqi, a director of Papillon, who was accused of corrupt practices at the March 8 general elections. .
Testifying, PL deputy leader Anglu Farrugia said that after the elections he had received several reports of persons who were paid to vote Nationalist. Anthony Zammit had spoken to him and told him that he worked at Mater Dei Hospital with Papillon Caterers and had been threatened to vote Nationalist. A certain man he knew as Cioffi went with him to the polling station and he was told to take a photo of his ballot paper using his mobile phone.
Dr Farrugia said this was just one of around 100 to 200 cases that he had asked the police to investigate in a report. The accused, he said, had bought votes for €200 each. Anthony Zammit was fired from work shortly after the election. Joe Calleja, secretary at the Electoral Commission, said he did not receive any reports of vote buying.
Police Inspector Daniel Zammit told the court that a certain Anthony Portelli, a former Papillon employee, had reported that he was threatened that if he did not vote PN, he would be fired. He had said that Edwin Cioffi, a cook with Papillon, went with him to vote.
Inspector Zammit said the accused allegedly told Kristylee Bezzina and Anthony Zammit that if Labour were elected, they were not to turn up for work. The accused Pierre Bartolo and Mr Cioffi were interrogated at length by the police, the inspector said. Kristylee Bezzina told the court that she had been working with Papillon for a year. While at work, Mr Bartolo told her to vote PN.
Under cross examination by defence counsel Joe Giglio, Ms Bezzina said that she voted how she intended to, for the Nationalists. She said the accused had dropped her off at the polling station and told her how to vote. The case continues.
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At the Birkirkara polling station in 1987, this is how it went.
A voter enters, nods at the MLP-appointed agent as if he knows him, and asks us to please mark the ballot-sheet for him because he is too ‘excited’ to do it himself. If memory serves me right, this charade was repeated around 130 times, and invariably Carmen Sant got the No. 1 vote. They all came in the morning and each time we locked the room and all other voters had to stay outside.
The MLP gave favours to those who promised to vote Labour.The voter was told to go on the eve of the election to the local MLP club and meet the agent who would be in the polling-booth handing out ballot-sheets. The voter was told to declare that he is illiterate and to ask for the assistance of the MLP agent.
It wasn’t an easy task being a commissioner/agent in the polling-booth in 1987. We had Lorry Sant supervising, it-Toto’ driving his Landrover round the school building, and a long snail’s-pace journey to Hal-Far. (I got home at 5am on Sunday.) There were armed soldiers all around and the usual red-shirted MLP ‘official’ shouting at everybody as if he was running the electoral show.
Hallina Ang!
All mobile phones should be surrendered at the desk before voting, to avoid accusations like these.
” With Anglu Farrugia’s reasoning, every single politician in this country should be prosecuted, because they all tell us how to vote, and that Armageddon will be personally delivered to our door if we don’t follow their advice. I imagine that I should be arrested, too. How many times have I told you all how to vote?”
Daphne, don’t be ridiculous. One can never compare a politician or an opinion writer like yourself asking us to vote for a particular candidate or party, and being forced to vote for that candidate or risk loosing ones job. Where’s your liberalism? Do you actually think that its ok for a person to force somebodies vote? Democratic politicians and op. writers NEVER force us, that’s what makes them democratic in the first place.
[Daphne – Darrin, nobody on earth can force you to vote in a way you don’t want to vote. It’s just not possible. I really don’t believe these stories told in court, particularly as they are being told by people who have been fired and have an axe to grind. Somebody who speaks so blithely and without embarrassment about selling his vote for EUR200 isn’t going to think twice about playing with the truth under oath.
There is no difference between my telling my readers how I think they should vote and a workplace manager doing the same with his staff. Neither of us is holding a gun to anyone’s head, and everyone is free to do what he likes in the polling-booth. There is a world of difference between an opinion, advice and a threat. In the run-up to the 2003 election, I took my car to be serviced at the usual place and found myself surrounded by the foreman and several mechanics, who wanted me to explain to them why they shouldn’t vote AD if they were in favour of EU membership. Another client who had just left – a wealthy businessman of the sort I like to call a champagne environmentalist – had just been trying to persuade them that even though they were in favour of EU membership, they should vote AD (it was all I could do to restrain myself from reversing right out of that garage and going after him with a metaphorical crowbar). So, should I and the AD supoorter both be prosecuted for telling people, who theoretically might feel ‘threatened’ by the possible removal of our business, how to vote? I don’t think so.
Let me tell you this: if I had been running a business in 1996, I would have spelled it out to my employees that for the sake of the business, and hence their own jobs, they should vote PN because the other one planned to cause major destructive upheaval with his new tax regime. Is that a threat? No. It’s an explanation to those who value their jobs and their employer’s stability and revenue that X politician is bad for the business and Y politician is not. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t make the connection.]
Daphne, these people really have a cheek. Did they forget how they frightened the old people at St Vincent de Paule, that if they don’t vote Labour, they would have no more pension, bonus and the rest? There is a proverb in Maltese: “biex tiskongra trid tkun pur”. Nahseb il-PL huwa l-boghod biex ikun pur.
[Daphne – I’m from Sliema, Mary. Those going to vote in 1981 and 1987 had to be protected by volunteers. I first voted in 1987, when the same people who are believed to have shot Raymond Caruana drove past the Sliema polling-station carrying guns at regular intervals, threatening us. I’d really like the opportunity to tell Anglu Farrugia where to stuff his xiri tal-voti, except that he’s probably already got a couple of elephants up there.]
You don’t get it do you? Despite the wrong that happened in the 80’s, this does not give a right for someone to blackmail somebody else’s vote now.
[Daphne – Why are you so ready to believe a self-confessed liar and fraudster? Or do you have another description for people who (they say) sold their vote for a pittance?]
Hmm, maybe because in real life, such things happen? After all, there is no evidence that he didn’t blackmail them is there? Put yourself in their shoes. The employer told them straight and plain that if Labour were elected, they were not to turn up for work. The employer didn’t put an economic argument about the respective parties tax policies, did he?
[Daphne – Once again, why are you so ready to believe a self-confessed liar? What’s the point of going through the court process if you already know the truth? I’m sorry, but something just doesn’t wash about this story. And it’s too much of a coincidence that it’s the ‘mouse-head’ people under siege again. As for that ‘If Labour is elected don’t bother turning up for work’, that’s not a threat, for heaven’s sake. It’s the kind of remark thousands of people make before every election: will the last one out please turn off the lights, that kind of thing.]
But where is there any evidence that the employees lied?
Just because they said that they had sold their votes, and you don’t believe them doesn’t make them liars either.
[Daphne – If I didn’t like you, Darrin, I would be very cross. Think clearly, because there are only two options and both make them liars. They said that they sold their votes. If it’s not true, then they are liars. And if it’s true, then they are fraudsters.]
@ assistant commissioner:
I get your point, but name one European country where you have to surrender your mobile phone to vote. Or where you have police officers at each polling station, for that matter. When I voted at the local council elections, as an EU citizen, in a certain EU country which shall remained unnamed, I didn’t even see any party officials hanging about. The only persons present were staff from the municipal office or local council, call it what you will. And that’s the way it should be. It sends a powerful message: Elections are organised and run by the government, not by political parties.
We’re paranoid about elections, that’s what, and we do our best to make 2009 seem like 1987.
It seems that the allegations are only being made by one of the employees, the one who was definitely fired. The second employee testified that she was *told* to vote for the Nationalist Party.
@ H.P Baxxter: you have to be in the polling station to understand what I am saying about mobile phones. The loyalty of many assistant commissioners is towards their party, and being what we are, one cannot rule out the taking of a photo of the completed voting document by the person doing the voting.
I remember when Dom Mintoff wanted the “trusted friend” system. The attempts to bypass the secrecy of how one votes started over 50 years ago. Are we going to leave technology (mobile phones) to wreak havoc on the right to vote without undue pressure, real or imaginary? This is Malta not Sweden.
It took just 750 people to swing the vote in the last election.
Isn’t Edwin Cioffi the guy who was charged with the murder of Ganni Lepre sometime in the early 1990s? I remember from the evidence it turned out that Lepre, a known criminal, had harassed Cioffi for years (harassment which included death threats for him and his family, mind you).
Lepre found Cioffi “hobz ghal snienu” … as we know, bullies the world over will not pick on just anyone, they pick on the weak, the meek and the introverted. Cioffi shot Lepre, with the same gun Lepre had given him to shoot his father-in-law.
Is he being picked upon again? Police “interrogated him at length” … because he gave a man a lift? Being the cook how did he threaten to make good his threats?
Oh, one of the witnesses is that Mr Zammit, known as Is-Sej. Just a reminder that he was implicated in the judges corruption case.
[Daphne – Bis-serjeta? One of Anglu Farrugia’s witnesses is a convicted criminal, a go-between who took money from a drug trafficker’s agent to a judge, to reduce the sentence? Oh, very credible….Imissu jisthi, jekk jaf kif.]
I can only put in one comment:
I hope that Anglu Farrugia is charged with contempt of court for wasting its time!
€200 for the most powerful thing you can possibly own – a vote? I never knew the Maltese were so dirt cheap. Either way, they’re scum & now they can thank Anglu for it, unless they were scum to begin with.