How Sant’s Labour Party collected protection money from businesses, just like the Mafia

The accountant Godfrey Leone Ganado has sent this in for upload here.

Exponents of the Labour Party and its supporters have been very keen to criticise the formal loan scheme which the Nationalist Party has launched. Deborah Schembri, the Parliamentary Secretary for Lands in the Office of the Prime Minister, and Owen Bonnici, the Justice Minister, have given a press conference on this subject.

Their criticism brought something back to me. Back in 1996, I was the managing partner of an audit firm. I was visited, at my office, by the Labour Party’s Manuel Cuschieri – he of the Super One radio show ‘Tajjeb Li Tkun Taf’, in which he routinely savaged perceived enemies of the Labour Party, and whose brother has now been appointed Malta’s ambassador to Greece.

He was supposed to be accompanied by Mario Vella, who is now in charge of Sai Mizzi’s employer, Malta Enterprise. Vella never turned up and instead rang Cuschieri to inform him that he was stuck at some other appointment.

Cuschieri asked me whether I agreed with the financing of political parties by the government and we exchanged small-talk on that issue. When we had exhausted that topic, he informed me that the Labour Party was seeking donations. They had devised a scheme, he told me, in which they had classified businesses according to the number of employees, and had ‘proposed’ a set donation on this basis.

I told him that our firm would not be donating money to political parties, and he surprised me by saying that the ‘proposed’ donation from our firm was fixed by the Labour Party at Lm5,000 (11,645 euros). I obviously laughed at this, and he got up and left empty-handed.

Manuel Cuschieri: the Labour Party used to send him out to collect ‘donations’ (read: protection money) from businesses. The donations were set by the Labour Party and not by the donor.