This government is just one big porn daisy-chain

You-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours just doesn’t cut it in the current context, I’m afraid. Just watch them go.

So Michael Falzon negotiates his fabulous (non)retirement package with the Bank of Valletta’s directors, as a bank employee, and while he’s doing that as a bank employee, he’s also negotiating with them, as the man responsible for the Government Property Division, about their wish to prolong their tenure on the House of the Four Winds on the Valletta bastions.

They got their deal, and he got his: daisy-chain, darlings.

Times of Malta carries a report today in which an unnamed civil servant says that the ‘legal exception’ which Michael Falzon used to change the bank’s 40-year lease to one of 65 years with better rights for the bank, “was never used for such a purpose before”.

The exception is in the Disposal of Government Land Act, and stipulates that a deal of this nature does not require a parliamentary vote or public tender “if it consists of land which is offered for an industrial project after applicant would have satisfied the government about the benefit which the project would render to the country’s economy and that it would create an adequate number of jobs”.

In other words, the government’s granting of the new lease to the bank under this clause is illegal, and should be challenged.

But exactly who is doing to do that?