False charity and true hypocrisy

I can’t stand people who use their ‘good deeds’ and charity as an ego-trip or for image-building purposes. Real charity is silent. You’re either doing it to help others or you’re doing it to make yourself look good. Once you begin boasting about it, it’s the latter.

But in this case, it’s far, far worse. The chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology has a financial package of more than €60,000 a year for which he goes in to the office only on Wednesdays. This is because, the rest of the week, he’s making more and more money in cash payments from fixing teeth and Botoxing wrinkles at his Smile Clinic in Haz-Zebbug.

He takes a fuel allowance in hard cash for using his personal car, has a full-time driver despite only going to the office one day a week – a driver who even takes him to the supermarket for his groceries – and then instead of taking some of that money he’s creamed off the Maltese public and buying a television for the children’s home himself, he presents one that has been bought with money raised by employees during various events throughout the year.

Trid tkun altru qammiel u bla zejt f’wiccek. When people use charity – particularly charity with children – for their own image, always be suspicious.

You will notice from this photograph that Lara Boffa, the executive chairman’s girlfriend who he put on the Science Council payroll as his personal assistant and then quietly promoted to a technical position so that he could pay her more, is not among the employees who went to help out at the children’s home. You would think that she, of all people, would be standing by her boss’s side in this initiative and fleshing out her political principles by helping those less fortunate.