Well done for this blog. I’ve become hooked.

You are missing one crucial point. Doing so deprives the donor from his/her right to choose whom to give the donation to.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, but I suspect this wasn’t a life or death situation, so the act was unquestionably wrong, as the man himself understood.

The Caritas centres abroad are open to all. They never ask wether a person is a poor or rich or if it is a genuine case or not when someone seeks help.

I am very curious to know what this person had stolen from the shop. Unfortunately plenty of Maltese take hmieg and imbarazz to charity shops instead of throwing them away.

Get off it. Theft existed back then and still does so now. Of course, if practically everyone is living in abject poverty, there isn’t much to steal. Crime might have increased since the Second World War but so has wealth and the population figure.

Crime is also more reported nowadays and the public is informed about the number of reported crimes, even petty ones. People are more aware of the law, communication is easy and people trust the police much more.

All these things have an effect on how much crime is reported and how much people get to know about it.

Theft is not always a wicked act. Sometimes, it’s just a desperate one.

As Moll Flanders puts it: ‘Give me not poverty, lest I steal.’

Is this really what you think? I heard stories about the war and about the Maltese who took items from dead people and bombed-out shops.

Maltese like any other nationality all act the same way – nothing special.

Anyway, he writes better English than Joseph Muscat.

vanni, I’d say that that is the handwriting of a woman who is a native English speaker and from a good family background.

A lawyer of a certain kind would type the letter on paper with the old government watermark, which he took home for his private use when no one was looking.

A lawyer would have typed the letter, and it would probably have been much longer than two pages.