I suppose Leo Brincat would like to say he had no choice there either. The poor little man. I grew up – to my 16th year – under these people, as many of us did. But in those days Mintoff and his whole team lead personal vendettas against those entrepreneurs who refused to bend and pay them backhanders.

My father was one of those people. He had to create businesses fast enough for the benefit to escape the line of vision of the band of liars and thieves in government, and those who wanted his areas of the market.

He started a variety of businesses which he kept as low key as possible and then sold them. This was the only way we could pay the salaries of a 100-plus employees that Mintoff’s team was pointedly doing their utmost to kill any source of income towards. Over many years.

My father was described as many things, on radio and television to the whole population. The army was brought out in full force to collect all his goods from the shops they had been distributed to one day – saying that he had smuggled them in. This was because a licence for 10 containers of a product had escaped them.

The containers’ contents (one singular product then long unavailable on the market – a basic commodity) were pre-sold and then delivered to customers on the same day of customs’ clearance. However his extremely corrupt competitor got wind of this and that same evening every single item had been collected back into holding stores by the army.

The real story was, of course, that my father refused to pay the 5 to 10 percent of the value of every container to Mintoff’s corrupt cabal of Ministers. We had a flourishing importation business. From 1980 onwards not one import licence was granted to us.

Our competitor however – the one who was then placed as chairman of several corporate entities by Mintoff and “unaware” successive governments, and whose personal businesses were helped and favoured with unsecured multi-million pound loans from banks where Mintoff bore his influence, had a copy of the government licensing stamp in his own offices. One by one he went after all our business, that he with Mintoff was responsible for freezing the licences for.

Mintoff made sure that at least one hour a day of my father’s time was wasted by price control court cases. For any price differences to that imposed, even for a 1mil difference, he was taken up to court.

They found ways of protecting their own, and any fabricated threat was sufficient to get those that didn’t bend to spend a night or two in jail for “further encouragement”. My father was one such person.

We were not given a telephone at home until 1985. For every little emergency we had to rush to a neighbour.

The police would come and tell us – night or day – that there was a report of a bomb scare at our home, under which pretext they went through everything.

This is Leo Brincat’s home environment. He always had a choice and his choice was not only to stay – and participate – under Mintoff but to return and inflict a worse government under Muscat.

Lies are second nature to this cabal. Backhanders – it goes without saying – too.

Whoever believes that Leo Brincat has a place in the European Court of Auditors is extremely irresponsible and should in turn be examined for soundness of their own integrity.

It took me some time to read this particular post – not because I didn’t have the time. But it is psychologically hard to have to return to those years time and time again to explain to others who have no comprehension of it just how bad things were.

There were periods on end, that in order to pay the salaries of those 100 plus employees over the Mintoff years, that we had only pasta to eat at home.

When I grew up I thought languages would be the only efficient key to escaping this lot. Languages, in the European territorial sense. So I studied and now speak a minimum of 7 of them. Europe and its environment that guaranteed basic democratic rights was my dream, the one that made all forced and imposed sacrifice and segregation worthwhile.

Leo Brincat does not belong there.

As for his assertion during the interview that he was not against Malta joining the European Union, does Mr Grinder realise that he was part of the Cabinet with a collective responsibility for freezing Malta’s s application while also the Minister responsible for making a hash out of the VAT / CET?