Are Robert Abela and Owen Bonnici out of their minds? Here’s the contract which shows that they’ve lost the plot.

Robert Abela is a nasty piece of work who spent five years freeloading at three palaces with his Labour Party executive wife, Lydia, when his father was head of state, but who then had no problem of conscience in taking to a mass meeting stage to verbally knife the man who made it possible, Prime Minister Gonzi – the very same man who also made it possible for his law firm to get the Malta Planning Authority legal-counsel contract for years and years and years (disgusting).

Now today Robert Abela is out to prove that as well as being a freeloading bum who grabs what he can no matter who is in government, he’s also good at playing at stupid. Sitting side by side with Owen Bonnici, he told the press that Zaren Vassallo of Vassallo Builders “lied” when he said he paid €8 million to “Marsovin for the Qormi land” because he only paid €900,000 and absorbed €7.1 million of their brewery debts.

Who are they trying to kid? They speak to even intelligent audiences as though they’re the congregation at one of Silvio Parnis’s coffee mornings. And unfortunately the newspapers don’t help, because instead of putting the facts into context, they run with the headline that Labour wants.

I was immediately swamped by emails from people who read the story and were shocked at what Robert Abela had said. How can he be so stupid, was the general tone. When you buy a company and agree to absorb its debts, the debts are factored into the price you pay. If you absorb €7.1 million of the company’s debts and pay the shareholders €900,000, you’ve paid €8 million for the company – absorbing the debts means you’re paying them yourself. You’ve bought the company the company for €8 million but because it is saddled with debts of €7.1 million which you have got to pay yourself, you give the shareholders €900,000.

A reader who is a corporate financial controller wrote in: “No wonder they’re making such a bloody mess if they can’t understand something so basic.”

And to demonstrate that it is Robert Abela and the Justice Minister who are lying (or damned stupid), here’s something that I hadn’t bothered to upload with my original report about the subject, though it looks like I should have: the actual contract of purchase for the sum of €8 million.