It was normal for Super One employees to go unpaid for weeks – the Labour Party had no money and a mountain of debt

From my column in The Malta Independent yesterday (the link to the whole article is below):

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In any case, my lawyer ended up having to move in with a garnishee order after all attempts at getting Lm750 from the Labour Party failed. Soon after the garnishee order went out to the banks, my lawyer rang: “Forget it,” he said. “We found nothing except a gaping red hole in all their bank accounts. And they’re so overdrawn that you can’t even get the money out of an overdraft. We’re going to have to send in the marixxalli to seize some of their things.” That would be the equivalent of the bailiffs.

I was pretty annoyed. “For heaven’s sake,” I said to my lawyer, “what do I want with Jason Micallef’s desk or swivel chair, or with a collection of their second-hand televisions and computers, unless they bring me a computer with all of Jason’s stuff on it?” The official communication was made to the Labour Party that I had no choice but to send in the bailiffs to pick up Lm750 worth of goods and chattels. Within the day, the party’s lawyer rang my lawyer and said that the money would be found, and would we hold off from seizing the goods. A cheque then arrived. Money had somehow been found.

I use this anecdote to illustrate that the ‘catastrophising’ in the press, the Nationalist Party itself, and elsewhere, about the PN’s current dire financial straits, is quite inappropriate. Yes, the situation is bad, but it is no different to that in which the Labour Party found itself after the 2003 electoral defeat. The party had absolutely no money and a mountain of debt. Toni Abela, now its deputy leader, even talked about strategic commercial plans to close the gap between income and expenditure, like his much laughed about ‘Labour supermarket’.

It was normal for Super One employees to go unpaid for weeks, to be asked to take ‘reduced rations’, or for volunteers to be roped in to do work so that the party would not have to recruit proper employees and pay them wages. Complaints from the Super One staff themselves were regular and rampant. But they never came to wider attention because there was no Facebook then and the internet was not as widely used as it is today, or used in the same way. But we in the media knew how discontented Super One staff were, and how badly paid if they were paid at all. Of course, they are not going to come out now and ask what all the fuss is about the situation in the Nationalist Party given that they were in the same situation themselves. That wouldn’t be convenient.

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