“If I hang on grimly (grim being the operative word here) for another 30 years, I might get to be where Agatha Barbara is now, installed at San Anton Palace”
A member of my international worldwide network of blog-readers sent me this touchingly nostalgic photograph of Alfred Sant, Lorry Sant and Marie Louise Coleiro in what their buddy Karmenu Vella (not shown in pic) likes to call the Golden Years of Labour government.
Alfred Sant was Malta Labour Party president at the time, and Marie Louise Coleiro was the party secretary-general. Lorry Sant was then the most corrupt cabinet minister Malta had ever known.
Thirty years on and Alfred Sant is about to become a member of the European Parliament on the same party’s ticket after having been its leader and the prime minister. Marie Louise Coleiro is the head of state. And they said we needed a change. At least that other one is long since in his grave after receiving a presidential pardon for corruption even before he had been convicted.
31 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
Presidential pardon from whom?
[Daphne – The clue is in the name.]
I think he meant: Who was president at the time?
[Daphne – It’s immaterial. It was a government decision.]
A pardon could have been given by any president.
[Daphne – Yes, but it’s irrelevant because the decision is the government’s and not the president’s. I can’t even remember who was president at the time.]
The decision was taken because he had a terminal illness and was agreed by both political parties.
Malta had an acting president at the time, Paul Xuereb.
It was Paul Xuereb, who was acting president during the last years of the Mintoffian regime under prime minister KMB and stayed on for a while under the Nationalist government.
Actually the President was the late Censu Tabone.
http://archive.maltatoday.com.mt/midweek/2007/07/25/t3.html
If Lorry Sant hadn’t died, he would have become a minister again.
Joseph Muscat would probably have offered him the position of Chairman of MEPA.
Good thing he didn’t die post-2003 or we’d have a life-size bronze statute of Lorry Sant alongside Mintoff’s.
Ghax rikonciljazzoni nazzjonali, what?
Lorry Sant has a big – if not huge – monument in Casal Paola, known in Maltese as Ir-Rahal il-Gdid – The New Village.
Lorry Sant kien mhux biss korrott, imma kien ukoll KRIMINALI.
Hu kien involut fl-incidenti f’Tal-Barrani f’Novembru 1986.
Jekk sa ma miet Lorry Sant ma kienx hemm infern, Alla zgur holoq wiehed ghalih.
Ix-xitan zgur li ghandu post specjali fejn qed izommu jinharaq!
Bill Millam
Los Angeles
PS: Daphne, I have no problem if you publish this comment as is, including my name.
Lorry Sant. God bless his soul. L-uniku wiehed li ma ghadux hemm jiffanga.
Smashing Gensna hairdo on that Marie-Louise Coleiro.
That hairstyle is known as Tema 79.
Baxxter, further to your comment above, we do have a life-size bronze statue of Lorry Sant. It’s in a public square in Paola. It was organised by Ronnie Pellegrini, his henchman and now director of Malta Freeport.
Yes, I’d forgotten that. If he’d died within the last five years the statue would have been organised and paid for by the government, and placed in Castile Square.
And so who was in government when the pardon was given?
[Daphne – The Nationalist Party, David, OBVIOUSLY. The Labour Party didn’t think him corrupt. Oh, and before you butt in and ask why he wasn’t investigated and prosecuted – he would never have lived to the end of any trial, even if people could be found to testify against him.]
A pardon is usually given to someone who has been found guilty of a crime or at least undergoing criminal proceedings or else in order to give witness against other criminal suspects. If I recall correctly, Mr Sant was not found guilty due to the statute of limitations (prescription).
[Daphne – Not found guilty of what, David? He wasn’t prosecuted. And time-barring did not come into it. The man kept right at it until he was booted out with the rest of his horrid crowd (including this government’s permanent representative at the World Trade Organisation, envoy to the World Tourism Organisation and candidate for EU Commissioner) in 1987.]
Lorry Sant was pure evil, much worse than Mintoff.
Lorry Sant controlled Duminku Mintoff. Lorry Sant possessed photographs of Duminku Mintoff in a compromising situation with Duminku’s brother’s wife with whom he apparently had an ongoing relationship.
Sant eventually revealed those photographs during a parliamentary session and laid them on the table of the house, whereupon the Speaker had them sealed in an envelope on grounds of public decency.
If being caught out scared Mintoff, it said a lot about his personality and his negotiation skills despite myths about the latter.
The thing to do was to make a public announcement on the lines of “my private life has nothing to with politics”.
National reconciliation does not work, look what state we are in today.
Reconciliation does work, it’s only that it was never carried out as it should have, resulting in its failure.
Reconciliation should dovetail with justice being done and being seen to be done, even if it is to the detriment of the parties responsible for conflict and everything Labour caused. A spade needs to be called a spade and guilty parties exposed for what they are.
Unfortunately, moving straight from a situation of conflict to ‘national reconciliation’ has allowed the myth that the perpetrators of the ‘Golden Years’ were in the right to survive among their families and supporters.
President Marie Louise Coliero Preca toady prides herself as a guru of human rights and as an advocate for those who are marginalised yet she was secretary general of the most corrupt party, which ran a regime that violated the rights and destroyed the lives of so many Maltese people.
So please keep it up because when you publish such facts about our President you are NOT attacking the presidency but getting our history right.
It’s her way of rewriting history and reconstructing her image.
What a coincidence – earlier this week I watched the youtube videos of Eddie Fenech Adami’s (then leader of the Opposition) reply to Labour prime minister KMB’s budget speech in 1986, just after Raymond Caruana was shot.
Among his points on the tal-Barrani incident and Raymond Caruana’s murder was the Labour government’s incompetence and inability to generate employment (10,000 unemployed as he spoke).
The Labour government’s solution to this problem was to put them on the public sector payroll. Alfred Sant, the Labour Party president, had written on one of their newspapers that putting 10,000 unemployed people on the public payroll would be madness. But it happened.
Lorry Sant really let himself go very early on.
It is like the man was insatiable and would have liked to swallow the whole world in a single gulp.
He is the poster-boy for unbridled corruption for eternity now.
Apparently, many people tend to change their ideas with change in government.
Lou Bondi used to feel threatened and write about Ronnie Pellegrini. Now both are having their iced buns from the PL government:
http://loubondi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ronnie-lorry-sants-thug-wants-to-chop.html
Well … il-Lorry’s grave gives him away doesn’t it? He now rests in a grave which manifestly should not be there and was clearly added all alone near the Addolorata chapel as an afterthought. In other words … it’s the closest you can get to an ODZ grave.
Lorry Sant had a giraffe.
Call it extravagant.