The only way to deal with somebody like Muscat is to be armed with the facts and a faster tongue than his
The prime minister was faced with a barrage of questions in parliament tonight about his consultant Shiv Nair. As usual, he deployed the logical fallacy of tu quoque:
“U intom! Wasn’t it your lot who gave him resident’s status in Malta?”
To make his logical fallacy worse, it is based on an entirely false premiss. The trouble is, nobody shot is back at him in parliament (or hasn’t yet), perhaps because they were not armed with the fact – a fact repeated on this website several times – that Shiv Nair is a British subject.
As the holder of a British passport, he has had freedom of movement in Malta since we joined the European Union in 2004. And that’s about as long as he has been here.
As the citizen of an EU member state, he can live and operate in Malta without permission from any government. He was not ‘granted’ residency by the Nationalist government. It is his right.
If Shiv Nair plans to acquire a Maltese passport, it will not be because he needs an EU passport as he has one of those already. It will be for the express purpose of creating another alias: a Maltese citizen with yet another variant of the name Shivshanker Nair, to exist alongside the British version. Maltese/British dual nationality is permitted, so there you have it.
From Malta’s very own companies registry:
BRITISH BORNEO HOLDINGS LTD.
Company Name (Registration No.) C 40540
Directors(1)
Involved Party Address Nationality
SHIV PREYAN SHANKER
093201697 15/18, STRAIT STREET,
VALLETTA
MALTA
BRITISH
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http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2013-10-08/news/government-still-investigating-internet-claims-on-shiv-nair-blacklisting-2834628609/
Still being looked into? Surely he should have looked into it before? Or did he think he’d get away with it?
Oh, and I love how he calls them “claims”.
No wonder Joseph Muscat never gave any details of his plans before the elections, he never had any (as I always suspected), but he is now showing us that he has no clue about anything.
Imagine, not knowing that Shiv Nair has a British passport and what that entails.
Has any prime minister anywhere else in the world ever made such a fool of himself as JM did by passing that comment about the previous government granting him a residence permit?
Yes, Nair has freedom of movement in Malta as a British citizen. But as far as I know this does not explain how he has a Maltese ID.
[Daphne – EU citizens can’t be refused residence in Malta. All non-Maltese residents of Malta have an ID card ending in A for ‘resident alien’. He is almost certainly here for tax purposes and because it is a good base for his dealings in the Middle East and Africa.]