Cassola is right about Cyrus Engerer, but not about Toni Abela
Arnold Cassola of Alternattiva Demokratika is right about Cyrus Engerer, who he calls a “callous delinquent”. He would also have been right in saying that having Engerer help Toni Abela in his quest to become a member of the European Court of Auditors “torpedoed his chances”, had Abela had any chances to begin with.
The fact is, he did not – and Cassola is wrong in his assessment of Abela, a founder member of AD, as a “gentleman”. Abela may well be a gentleman where Cassola is concerned, but that is not how we should assess people – in the context of how they behave with us.
No gentleman would have covered up cocaine-dealing at a party club for which he was responsible, to protect the interests of the party. That, too, is the behaviour of a callous delinquent, and some would consider it far worse, given Abela’s position of authority, than revenge porn.
Abela stood no chance at all. The fact that somebody who covered up cocaine-dealing in a party club was then helped around the European Parliament by a Prime Ministerial envoy serving a suspended sentence of two and a half years for doing what he did, and who does not have security clearance in Brussels precisely because of that, only served to compound Toni Abela’s woes and the miserable, corrupt image projected by the Prime Minister of Malta.
Cassola could not be more right about the preposterous way in which the Prime Minister assigned his “callous delinquent” to the job, but he has to look at the Prime Minister’s nominee objectively and see that in the eyes of European Parliament observers, he is not much better.
At this juncture, we have to ask ourselves what sort of circles the Prime Minister moves in, what sort of background he comes from, that he thinks it perfectly all right to dispatch these two individuals to ‘Europe’, one in his name and the other in Malta’s. If he has no problem with what they have done, and if he really thinks two such inept people can do the job, then we have to ask ourselves what is wrong with the Prime Minister himself.