People have already begun to ask: what does Cyrus Engerer have on the prime minister?
The Sunday Times editorial/leading article today
It’s a question that has been asked about several others – from John Dalli to Franco Debono to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando to Jason Micallef.
Now it’s resurfacing with Cyrus Engerer. The way the Labour Party machine has mobilised itself to support, champion, lionise and defend Cyrus Engerer – at a great cost to the party itself – just begs the question.
I don’t think there is necessarily any hold Engerer has on the prime minister. I believe the prime minister’s character is such that he will go to any lengths to shield his sense of judgement from criticism. Letting Engerer go now would be a public admission of error in taking him on in the first place. He would also have to admit that error to himself. People’s suspicions are, however, justified. We are talking here of a man whose documented behaviour reveals that he has no qualms about illicitly obtaining information and using it to blackmail or avenge himself on others, or for other equally amoral ends.
He has just received a two year suspended prison term for just that.
But we are forgetting that he is very likely to be the one who ratted on his fellow councillors when he was deputy mayor of the Sliema Local Council. Practically every councillor was targetted in one way or another, through leaked recordings or leaked information, though Cyrus Engerer was not.
Conversations recorded illicitly while the council was in session were used by the Labour Party media to create a monster fuss about remarks made in passing by PN councillors. Even a Labour councillor was targetted in a case that ended up in court and is still being dragged through the system.
Now I do not for one minute think that the stars aligned themselves to put whoever recorded those conversations in the fortunate position of having his recording function switched on just at that precise moment, on those particular days, for those particular sessions.
The person who recorded them was probably recording every single session, selecting the record function as soon as he sat down, and turning it off as soon as the session was over. It’s very easy to do this with a smart-phone. People just think you’re switching your phone to silent and then putting it back on again, or checking a message.
This kind of behaviour is more common than you think. When I found out last year that somebody I knew does it routinely even to those supposedly closest to her, I broke off all contact. Well, you can hardly go to lunch or for coffee with somebody and ask them to hand over their phone, can you – but then again, you can’t trust that person not to record you for kicks, either, so unless you’re prepared to sit there making stiff small-talk about the weather, you just have to avoid somebody like that.
I wouldn’t put it past Cyrus Engerer to have used his smart-phone to record every meeting, however casual, he has had with Joseph Muscat, the deputy prime minister in whose secretariat he works, and any other Labour party personage he has had dealings with.
Muscat is probably savvy enough to be alert to this risk – the one thing of which nobody can accuse him is of being a poor judge of character because he assess people absolutely precisely in terms of their character weaknesses – but the same cannot be said of others.
I’d put Cyrus Engerer down as just the sort of person who sneaks around storing up information on others which he can then use against them, and the easiest and most obvious way to do this is with an iPhone or other smart-phone. It’s astonishing how even the most innocuous remark or joke that you might make in conversation with somebody you trust – or even just anybody, really – can, when taken out of context and put up on YouTube, be effectively detrimental.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140511/editorial/editorial-muscats-soldier-of-steal.518493
And that brings to mind Toni Abela, and the infamous ‘blokka silg’ recording. Only somebody very ‘in’ could have been in a position to record Toni Abela saying that.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-05-11/leader/soldier-of-steel-4940300288/
And there are apps that let you record an incoming phone call without the person phoning you knowing that you’re doing it.
The PM will start to have bad dreams about Cyrus, what the latter has gathered about him and what Cyrus has literally on record.
Both The Sunday Times of Malta and The Malta Independent on Sunday are on same wavelength in their leading articles today.
Konfoffa fahxiha kontra l-Prim Ministru Joseph Muscat u s-suldat tal-azzar Cyrus Engerer.
Dan is-suldat gdid tal-azzar zgur muhiex tal-istainless steel.
Certainly not – Cyrus is of the ‘stain and steal’ type not stainless steel or perhaps ‘steal and stain’ to be more precise.
‘Konfoffa fahxiha’ has nothing to do with all this.
We have a situation here where a would-be MEP was found guilty of sneaking into his ex-boyfriend’s flat, downloading information from his computer, and emailing this information to his ex-boyfriend’s boss in order to damage his reputation and destroy him.
This he did because the latter decided to break off their relationship. If you tell me that in all this you may see anything or something with a trace of honour hanging around it then you surely must be out of your wits.
At a guess I would say that Cyrus’s hold is the same as all the other “holds” on Muscat’s neck from pre-election promises of a heaven on earth to just about anyone who would help him in his campaign. Those many chickens are coming home to roost.
The prime minister appears to be at the mercy of a gang very vengeful and merciless blackmailers.
Spot on. This Cyrus is a real slimy person. He went to great lengths to hit back at his ex boyfriend.
People seem to overlook the fact that he even entered his ex’s home with a key he retained. Surely his ex would have demanded the key back before the split, but Cyrus had a copy made beforehand.
This was a well-planned premeditated action to blackmail his ex partner. Not only did he not apologise but he attempted to blackmail him again in the courtroom.
Of course he grassed on his colleagues at the Sliema local council. Disgustingly he did not report any shortcomings to the PN leadership but leaked it to Labour.
His motivation? To become mayor, of course.
Indeed Labour is lucky that it was able to drop him now, as undoubtedly he would have been another Sandro Schembri Adami waiting to happen. Possibly with worse consequences as an MEP.
The question is, had he already negotiated his thirty pieces of silver with Labour at that point?
If others had already done it in 2008 and prior, it is not an impossibility.
Was he then persistent with the sending of photos when the occasion presented itself because it was thought that this would create the right rabble rousing effect for the LGBT movement?
The way that he believed himself to be completely above the law throughout, the support not only from Joseph Muscat but Franco Debono’s totally illegal blackmail-in-court incident (not that it’s ever legal) point to an irrationality that seems to need a larger picture to be complete.
There’s more to this story.
Is this perhaps why some ministers insist of having people’s phones taken away or switched off before they are seen to in their ministries?
He had a pen-drive on his ex. Nahseb ghandu xi external hard-disk fuq Joseph.
Dear Prime Minister, if you had to go rummaging through the pages of Maltese history and politics you would discover much to your surprise that the ” soldiers of steel ” with whom you have been inexplicably comparing Cyrus Engerer were made of much more solid and sensible stuff than you would have ever imagined.
These honourable men had absolutely nothing in common with your so-called “champion of gay rights”. Comparing Cyrus with these soldiers of steel is like comparing a filthy mercenary with a Samurai.
This hateful crime of his is solid proof that this ruffian is not as honourable as you may believe him to be.
He is dishonest and hypocritical.
Cyrus Engerer works in Louis Grech’s private secretariat, right?
He wouldn’t have resisted the temptation of downloading top secret information on Henley and Partners. Wouldn’t he?
My view is that Joseph Muscat is really an active secret homosexual pretending to be a heterosexual and Cyrus has the goods on him.
The lipstick was the tip-off.
Maybe he was a spy.