Bazwar l'hawn, bazwar l'hemm
Sheer brilliance: Labour's star lawyer in its class action suit on car registration tax
Every so often, I get a little reminder of what really, really bugs me about the Labour Party, far more than anything else including its recent history of corruption, violence and human rights abuse.
This something is more bothersome than all that because it is not in the past, but still very much in the present.
Labour just can’t seem to do anything with slick professionalism and an eye to the important details. Its unwritten slogan appears to be U Iwa, Mhux Xorta.
No wonder so many people feel comfortable with Labour in this land of shoddy work and slipshod standards.
Take its ‘class action’ suit for a refund of car registration tax on VAT, filed on behalf of 18,000 people. The party was told at the outset that our legal system does not allow for this kind of action.
But Labour knew better. “We have very good lawyers and they know what they’re doing,” Muscat said.
I wondered out loud whether the very good lawyers are deputy leaders Anglu and Toni, the one taking a break from hunting for people who sold their vote and the other relaxing in between taking peeks at the rubber breasts of ‘hot’ Teletubi puppets.
The government has engaged the services of Professor Ian Refalo who, together with deputy attorney-general Peter Grech, has had the list of 18,000 names combed through for anomalies.
Professor Refalo told the press that the Labour Party’s class action list includes people claiming in their own name for cars bought by companies, and others claiming for cars bought way back in 1996.
Those are just the cases that the government’s lawyers were able to identify at the outset. A more thorough examination will almost certainly reveal that, among those 18,000 claims, there are many more which are not merely erroneous but fraudulent.
When you’re not answerable for your actions and you are not going to be called up to furnish the court with precise details in your own name and under oath, there will be many who tell themselves: ‘Majtezwel niehdu cans. M’hemm xejn x’titlef.’
In its opportunistic rush to get out a pre-electoral popularity-raising tactic, the Labour Party showed itself to be more concerned with numbers than with accuracy. And so it took all comers, failing to verify their claims or check their details. Hence the inclusion of cars bought before the 2004 watershed and the personal claims for company cars.
Who knows what other sorts of tbazwir and futtagni that list includes? After all, this is Malta and that is the sort of person the Labour Party’s tactic was bound to attract.
This is precisely why each of those 18,000 cases must be tackled individually, despite Labour’s protestations to the contrary. The government’s lawyers are insisting on this, and they are right.
It would be completely out of order, and wholly unjust – corrupt, even – to allow that list to go through without checking each and every name on it for fraud, error or whether the person really does have a face-value claim or not.
If the class action suit is allowed to go through, and the case is won as a class action suit, then even the frauds, the liars, the mistaken and those who don’t have a case will get their money.
The Labour Party, true to form, sees this as an unnecessary focus on the details and niceties. The government’s lawyers, Labour says, are being “formalistic” and concentrating unnecessarily on procedure. If each of those 18,000 cases is to be heard separately, it will take too long.
And it will also jam up the law courts. But who cares about that?
Am I alone in finding Labour’s attitude completely unbelievable? ‘Let’s save time by ignoring procedure, lumping the genuine cases with the frauds and the liars and those who bought cars eight years before we joined the EU, and go ahead. L-aqwa li naslu. U iwa, mhux xorta?’
Oh, and by the way, I was right about the identity of one of Labour’s ‘very good lawyers who know what they’re doing’. The party’s case is being fought by deputy leader Anglu Farrugia.
No wonder it’s descended into farce: another one to add to his illustrious list of claims that agents of the PN, using a central fund, bought votes off Labour junkies for Lm10, using as his star witness Is-Sej, he who was the go-between carrying bribe money to those appeals court judges.
Mur arah ministru tal-gustizzja.
What appalling standards. You have to hand it to Labour: they really know how to bounce along the bottom of a barrel.
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Let me launch a Caption Competition for Anglu’s picture…
Here goes:
“Hmmmm lemme see how far I can lower the bar this time”
It’s so low, they’re limbo dancing.
Good one Corinne!
Another one:
“Oh and I thought that the bar was where one goes to get a grokk mal-hbieb tal-hbieb”
No, that’s where you go to buy votes from Labour party supporters, apparently.
Louis Grech said that the PL cannot come up with solutions for the “frajjeg Nazzjonalisti”. What goes round comes around: now that the PL made this “froga legalistika” it should find a solution for these poor people. People who know the ropes predicted this scenario long before the famous queues at St Joseph High Road.
[Daphne – It’s not enough to have a law degree. You also need a rational mind, something that neither Anglu nor Toni has. The principle that the defending party has the right (indeed, the duty) to call each and every person involved in a case to testify under oath in court is one that holds true whether there are 18,000 people involved or just 18. Even I could work that one out and I’m not a lawyer. It tells me a lot about Muscat’s mental abilities that he wasn’t able to work it out without the assistance of a lawyer, still more with the assistance of several. I really don’t think there’s very much going on upstairs there. As for his lawyers, they should be drowned in a bucket. One deputy leader can’t string a written sentence together, and neither deputy leader can formulate a coherent thought: when they speak, they babble.]
They can simply categorise the cases (if different categories do exist) and make a test case for each category so as to create a precedent as the case may be. If the Court rules in favour of plaintiffs the aftermath would still be a complicated affair, but with a precedent in place it could be settled administratively.
The problems of the supposed ‘class action’ case apply to categorised cases too.
Corinne, the gist of my comment is not categorisation, but precedence. It could be just one test case. If the Court finds in favour of the government, it would be useless to pursue the matter.
Utter rubbish. The time for those kind of checks is if and when the case is decided in favour of the plaintiffs, before any payment is made. Not now. These are pure delaying tactics by the government – which shows that it feels it has a lost case.
[Daphne – You don’t know much about the law, do you. Once the case is decided in favour of those 18,000 names, you can’t go around picking and choosing who gets the money and who doesn’t.]
In the meantime, thousands of Labourites zone out to a place far far away.
It is worrying that the PL considers legal procedure to be a mere formality. It is the same mentality that, in 1987, prompted them to propose turning a hospital ward into an improvised law court so that Pietru Pawl Busuttil could be tried while he was seriously ill in bed.
Labour aren’t serious about this business. In making this froga, they undermine the finances of the country – the country they hope to lead in four years’ time. In this country, there is no alternative. Non c’e l’imbarazzo della scelta. Ghandha biss imbarazz.
I certainly want the checks to be carried out in detail. I don’t want my taxes used to pay fraudulent claims. I couldn’t care less if it takes forever.
There shouldn’t be any difficulty about that – the magistrate, if he/she finds for the plaintiff, will be able to set the conditions he/she sees fit for the disbursement. The checking can take place AFTER the case is decided.
[Daphne – Consult a lawyer, but not Anglu Farrugia or Toni Abela. Any party to the class action suit who is excluded from receiving a refund must be excluded IN THE JUDGEMENT. There will be a single judgment, excluding Mr X, Mrs Y, and Miss Z, most probably a few thousand times over. And for that to happen, each of those 18,000 parties to the suit must be studied on their own merits. Though I knew this already, I’ve just double-checked with the lawyer on my sofa. It’s very convenient having one to hand.]
And, just to set the record straight, these aren’t “your taxes”. It is money collected (allegedly) illegally being returned to its rightfull owners.
[Daphne – Oh, that’s long been spent. Any shell-out of however many millions is going to come straight out of fresh taxes or budgetary cuts.]
Twanny: On what basis would a magistrate ‘find for the plaintiff’, without looking at the particularities of each and every party?
Name and shame.
I’m very interested to know who applied with the PL to be considered part of the class action, knowing that he/she was not entitled to apply in the first place.
Daphne, you’ve got it all wrong about PL not having the necessary legal minds – they now have Dr Michael Grech and bella compania to handle this case.
[Daphne – He’s not handling it, though. The Legal Beagle team is composed of Anglu Farrugia, Labour MP Chris Cilia and somebody called Alex Sciberras.]
I always thought there was something fishy in this case. I was even told to join the queue but it never made sense to me.
These are the exact words I was told, then: ” Hu int qisek paxu ha thallihom lill dal-lib.. Gvern. Mhux bizejjed qieghed johodlok min halq uliedek”.
The first judgment should be against Muscat for ‘contempt of court’, given that he declared that if the court rules that they are not to be compensated he will compensate them anyway. Labour leaders have a history of playing on weak minds and especially of those who always expect something for nothing.
Wrong premise. If the court finds against the plaintiff (the PL) it will not say “the government CANNOT pay out). It can only say “the gov DOES NOT HAVE TO pay out”.
So there would be nothing improper or illegal in a POLITICAL decision to reimburse the money collected.
[Daphne – I’m not working on the basis of a premise. There would be nothing ‘illegal’ but it would certainly be most improper and politically dangerous. The government can’t just decide to give hand-outs to people when there is no legal or moral basis for doing so. With that attitude, what’s to stop Prime Minister Muscat handing out taxpayers’ money to his friends just because he feels like it? I hate to say it, but with your sort of reasoning, no wonder you vote Labour. There’s another point you miss: if Prime Minister Muscat has it in mind to give out the money whatever the court says, why bother taking the case to court at all? To clog up the system, cause further court delays, and waste people’s time? Or maybe it was just an attention-getting stunt.]
What about the “political” decison by Lawrence Gonzi to pay the demoted ex-ministers and parl. secs. 18 months’ salary for nothing? This was absolutely unprecedented and he had absolutely no obligation to do so.
[Daphne – That was wrong, but you appear to think it was acceptable. Either that, or you are under the impression that two wrongs make a right.]
Dear Jomar,
All politicians play on weak minds, possibly also in your immediate surroundings.
A court case involving 18,000 claims (or 18,000 separate court cases) promises to be not only extremely time-consuming but also very expensive. Since it was assumed that the PL would be footing the bill for all claims, including the invalid ones, they are going to need a couple of new fund-raising marathons on One TV.
Daphne, it’s been a long time since I contributed to this blog, as I was busy converting my car to a fully electric car. However, I did not miss one bit – “kont wara il-persjana”
They are using the same tactic used in 1998, remember that farce when Mark Sammut and the Three stooges signed “il patt tal-poplu”? Unbelievable!
The new Three Stooges failed to understand that the government can impose any tax on anything as long as it’s not discriminatory. In this case it was not discriminatory; it was just an 18% tax which was called VAT. The government could have simply called it car tax, road tax or paqqa tax.
This was a matter of formality – before accession to the EU it was called VAT and was not changed after 2004. The European Union does not accept the charging of VAT twice over, therefore on importation from countries in the EU, any VAT payment was against EU rules. The government should have changed the tax name before 2004; however this does not mean that anybody merits refund just for formality’s sake.
It seems that Joseph Muscat is too willing to run with the stupid issues instead of tackling things the right way. Car prices are ridiculous: the PL could have just promised to reduce car prices after 2013.
I think it all boils down to the fact that even if we don’t agree with details – the law IS the law and we have to abide by it. We have our legal system and I would expect all lawyers to know what is and what is not possible. To be honest, I didn’t think of all the problems that would arise if the case was decided in favour of plaintiffs. I also didn’t know that exclusions have to be included in the judgement. Now that you’ve mentioned it, it’s obvious.
http://maltastar.com/pages/ms09dart.asp?a=3158
Ricky Dalton – 17 July 2009 10:56
I am not a politician as a matter of fact i don’t know sod all about politics in this country, but i can foresee a big win for Mr.Muscat in this coming election, he seems to have his brians and heart in the right place, besides i would put his character down on the same level as Presid. Obama, well liked by the people and a good sence of humour something that is very rare with some Maltese., just my humble foreign opinion. If by chance i get a negative feedback, i say read my lips if one can: FRANKLY MY DEAR I JUST DON’T GIVE A DAMN: from the 1939 fantastic movie ‘Gone with the wind’ with Clark Gable & Vivian Leigh. G’day all. Aussie Boy
[Daphne – Sigh.]
The government owes something around Eur105,000,000, (yes, 105 million euros) to various citizens for expropriation of land and property going back some 40 years.
If Tonio Fenech and his cohorts, drag this case (the VAT return on vehicle registration, I mean), for the same duration, which is normally the case with any government handout anyway, then the gallant 18,000 will certainly end up like the charge of the Light Brigade, and government will save itself some Eur58 million, EU or no EU.