FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS UPDATE: The foreign minister’s son-in-law and his grace-and-favour package
The news broke yesterday, after a question in parliament was answered at last, that the foreign minister’s son-in-law is not the executive chairman of the Lotteries and Gaming Authority, with the CEO position being scrapped, but has been given the inherently contradictory positions of BOTH non-executive chairman and chief executive officer. This allows him to collect the salaries of the two positions while doing just the one job.
Eur 68,500 – chief executive officer salary
Eur 13,000 – non-executive chairman salary
Eur 81,500 – total basic salary
The parliamentary reply did not give details of his perks and allowances, but just said that he is entitled to a car, fuel, and telephony allowance, and health insurance.
Well, here they are:
Eur 1,000 – health
Eur 7,500 – car
Eur 2,000 – fuel
Eur 1,500 – mobile telephony
Eur 500 – fixed line and broadband
Eur 12,500 – total allowances (that we know about)
The package being paid to Joseph Cuschieri, who is married to the foreign minister’s daughter Clare, is Eur 94,000 (minimum).
Cuschieri is being depicted in the pro-government press as having been the telecom regulator when in effect he was only one of five chief officers and had left the Malta Telecommunications Authority in 2006 to join Vodafone.
He breached ethical standards and broke his contractual obligations by going straight from the Malta Communications Authority to Vodafone, a regulated company, as its head of legal, regulatory and corporate affairs, where he recruited Super One’s head of news Miriam Dalli as a senior executive in corporate affairs.
Those who work for the regulator in a senior capacity are barred from taking up positions with the operators they regulated before a certain amount of time has gone by.
As far as I can discern, he was made to pay no price for doing so and has now used his Labour Party connections to lever himself into yet another regulatory position, this time in Lotteries and Gaming, with a very comfortable salary and allowances for doing not particularly much.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCJDpEBog3s
Double super paid jobs – jezistu biss ghal tal-qalba – l-ohrajn jittewbu – SHAME
And where’s the press now? You know, the same press that made such a big deal over a fucking rickety cuckoo clock just a few months ago.
A new phrase from LP lexicographers, “a chief non-executive, executive officer chairman”.
In other words brazen double-speak.
I can’t wait for the next election to get away from my job
So why would he leave Brussels today instead of Friday? Where would he be going one would ask?
Coming from the igaming industry, I feel that this is a sad day for those who work in senior posts within it.
In Las Vegas, to join the Nevada Gaming Commission, you need 25 years of experience in the industry and Malta probably it is the opposite.
From a fair point of view, for all their mistakes, one must admit that they appointed competent people to lead in comparison for getting an executive post for appearing on a billboard.
When former MEPA chairman compared himself to an expensive car many online commentators were scandalized but it seems that no online commentator is scandalized with Mr Cuschieri’s pay package.