This despicable behaviour is now beyond belief
As if its lionising of a man sentenced to two years in prison were not enough, the Labour Party has – clearly directed by the prime minister who used the same tu quoque defence this morning – begun scraping hard at the bottom of the barrel to protect Cyrus Engerer.
Or rather, to protect Joseph Muscat’s decision to take him on in 2011, when he was already under prosecution.
Times of Malta now reports:
The Labour Party asked this afternoon whether PN leader Simon Busuttil was to stay silent on MP Claudio Grech or whether he was going to make him shoulder political responsibility.
The PL said the Opposition leader did not say anything about how Mr Grech had falsified an ID card, a crime he had been found guilty of in court.
Mr Grech, it said, had held several positions in important government agencies including MITA.
Dr Busuttil, the PL said, should be consistent and call on this MP to shoulder political responsibility.
The PN leader, it said, could not abstain from this decision as he did on other matters including the vote on civil unions and his position on hunting.
This is shocking, but what shocks me more is the way Times of Malta has uploaded this misleading dirt without bothering to ring Claudio Grech or find out the facts.
I had done so earlier with no problem at all when I was writing my column for The Malta Independent tomorrow. I rang the Nationalist Party to find out what he was talking about when he said that there is a Nationalist MP with a criminal conviction, I got the details, and then I rang Claudio Grech.
You can read about it in my column, but these are the facts. When he was a teenager, Claudio Grech (now 40) was charged with faking an ID. The magistrate ruled that it was a childish act and he clearly had no intention of profiting from it, and she gave him a conditional discharge. This means that he never even had a police record. This happened more than 20 years ago and he wasn’t involved in politics at the time.
Shockingly (more so because they are the party in government and this level of deceit is reprehensible), the Labour Party seeks to equate this case – a conditional discharge given to a teenager who wasn’t in politics more than two decades ago for faking an ID – with that of a prominent politician in his 30s who was sentenced just days ago to two years in prison for a crime committed against another person.
Worse still, while being in full possession of the facts as to Claudio Grech, it releases only a fraction of the information and makes it seem as though he was convicted while holding a senior public role or serving as a politician. It does not say he was a teenager at the time and that this happened over 20 years ago.
Absolutely disgusting. This sort of thing really worries me because these are the people in near-absolute power and they stop at nothing to protect themselves.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140510/local/pn-should-make-claudio-grech-shoulder-responsibility-pl.518456
What does a person who without the required PSG (Public Service Garage) and MEPA permits leases out his car deserve to get? Without these permits it is illegal for any one to operate in this sector.
So first we had Manuel Mallia hugging criminals at Corradino and now we have Joseph hugging yet another convicted man.
Disgusting.
timesofmalta.com uploaded the Claudio Grech news item at 15.48. By 18.15 the usual suspects were out in full force with 73 comments (all uploaded in the last hour !) mainly equating Claudio Grech with Cyrus Engerer.
Can the Times of Malta sink any lower !
No, it can’t. That’s why I barely ever visit it any more – and I’m not alone either.
This is a graph of the timesofmalta.com rank from Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/timesofmalta.com
Do you notice a trend? In the meantime, since the election and their site redesign, The Independent has climbed to 10th, overtaking Malta Today (11th) very recently. This website weighs in at 13th.
‘The PL said the Opposition leader did not say anything about how Mr Grech (Claudio) had falsified an ID card, a crime he had been found guilty of in court.’
This is the height of irresponsibility. For Joseph Muscat a silly mistake committed in youth seventeen years ago and for which Claudio was conditionally discharged is equal to a 2 year jail term suspended for two years for theft, illegal entry, distribution of pornographic material with the sole purpose of harming the victim and blackmail.
Interestingly enough this case was originally brought to light by none other than Franco Debono, Cyrus Engerer’s defence lawyer the same person who blackmailed Cyrus’s victim into submission and into accepting to drop the case against Cyrus Engerer.
The case only continued because all the other illegalities committed by Engerer were not under the control of the victim.
The truth is that Joseph Muscat and Cyrus Engerer share the same lack of values with Franco Debono.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120808/local/franco-debono-to-protest-to-pn-executive-over-claudio-grech-s-candidacy.432058
The Times dishing dirt on behalf of the MLP. Why are you shocked?
If this spiteful vindicative excuse of a man Engerer lives one thousand years he will not achieve what Claudio Grech has achieved to date. Whilst Engerer and his father want to decriminilize drugs, Claudio Grech has set up a foundation using his MP salary to assist young people who have such problems. But of course that has no news value for “The Times”. Shamefull indeed.
Joseph Muscat can’t justify his obnoxious behaviour so he resorts to his usual tu quoque defence, by bringing up unrelated cases.
No comparison to Cyrus’s vile act towards a fellow gay man. It looks like Cyrus has some skeleton of Muscat’s in his cupboard.
This shows panic in the Labour camp.
The whole Claudio Grech matter was done to death in 2012 after our now Law Commissioner and master of pen drives threw a tantrum and blurted out that he was better than him because he was a good boy when he was young (cue the bringing out of form IIC report).
I see Times of Malta’s back to its old tricks. Indeed how covenient spreading what amounts to slander.
Can we please quit the power games and work towards Malta electing the MEPs it deserves?
A cornered rat will bite the cat.
The MLP is desperate.
It will try anything no holds barred.
This is to be expected after a swathe of unbelievable cock-ups.
The Times of Malta is competing with PBS in making Joseph and his gang ‘happier’.
[Daphne – I don’t think that is a fair assessment any longer. The newspaper and especially its sister Sunday carry some very good reports about government business, though they have the resources to do a great deal more. The editorials of both newspapers are often particularly astute, as with today’s, but unfortunately people tend not to read the leading article or understand its significance in a newspaper.]
That’s because it is usual for leading articles in Maltese papers to be badly written and incredibly boring. When the occasional good leading article appears, it makes the headlines precisely for this reason.
In the main, Times of Malta shows a worrying deference to authority that is the antithesis to good journalism. A good journalist believes nothing, questions everything, and doggedly pursues the story until the end.
Maltese journalists do the opposite. They believe everything, question nothing, and give up after the cookies are brought out.