More than half a million euros in public funds in three years for Engerer-Debattista couple

Left to right: Cyrus Engerer, the prime minister, Randolph Debattista

One of the ugliest things about the prime minister, and there are many, is the way he controls others through humiliation when he has worked out that he can get away with it, and when it serves his purposes to do so.

Another really ugly aspect of his personality and methods is directly related to this. It is the way he uses those he cannot control through humiliation to humiliate those he can control in that way.

The most recent example – and really quite a disturbing one – was reported in The Sunday Times last week but escaped the general attention it deserved, I suspect because many people do not understand the psychology of control and domination, or the perverted methods used by abusive personalities.

They do not understand that exactly the same methods can be used, by those who wish to assert their dominance abusively in a group or organisation, as those used by abusers in the home or domestic set-up.

The Sunday Times reported that Malta’s permanent representative to the European Union is now subject to the authority of Cyrus Engerer, the prime minister’s self-described ‘sherpa’ in Brussels. Any documents which she wishes to submit to institutions of the European Union must first be vetted by Engerer.

Aside from the fact that the perm rep should report only to the deputy prime minister as Minister for Europe, there is this to consider: Cyrus Engerer is currently serving a two-and-a-half year suspended prison sentence for letting himself into his ex boyfriend’s flat, illicitly copying highly specific and very compromising photographs featuring his ex boyfriend in various sexual acts, and emailing them via specially-created email addresses to his ex boyfriend’s employer, boss and colleagues at The Body Shop.

To conceal his tracks further, he went to the GasanMamo agency office in Rabat, where a friend of his worked, asked her to use her computer there, and used it to email out another batch of these photographs, in full knowledge that if the police investigated, the IP number of a fixed, corporate office would lead them directly to her desk and she would be blamed.

This is the prime minister’s special envoy, his ‘sherpa’.

As though it is not bad enough that Marlene Bonnici has had this convicted criminal imposed on her, she also has to contend with the imposition, as her chef de cabinet, of Engerer’s boyfriend Randolph Debattista, a former Super One reporter and Labour Party activist with no experience in the field.

Now she is trapped and monitored (and humiliated) by Joseph Muscat’s Stasi stool pigeons, who are most certainly not there on merit but for roughly the same reasons Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, Franco Debono is president of the ‘Law Commission’ and John Dalli is/was the prime minister’s personal consultant.

One small mercy is that, unlike Randolph Debattista who is actually in the office as chef de cabinet, his boyfriend Engerer has an office outside, in Dar Malta’s public area, because his criminal record means that he cannot get security clearance.

Engerer’s contract runs until the next general election, by which time he will have received 300,000 euros of public funds in terms of salary, non-taxable allowances, settling-in allowances, clothing allowances, flights (which are Club Class only), and no-limits allowances for hospitality (restaurants and so on) and smart-phone bills.

Randolph Debattista receives a basic salary of 60,000 euros a year. This means that by the time the next general election comes round, this couple of associates of Joseph Muscat will have received, for entirely non-meritocratic and corrupt reasons, more than half a million euros in public funds.

But Engerer and Debattista were both put on the public payroll immediately Labour came to power in 2013, so if you add to this half million the money they were paid while working in Louis Grech’s ministry and the prime minister’s office, you’re looking at more than 600,000 euros in public funds given to these two corrupt pigs at the trough in Labour’s first five-year term.