Michael Falzon: A fraud, liar and cheat who is now pontificating about right and wrong and his failure to understand either

What an absolute hypocrite. The brass neck of some individuals is beyond belief. Michael Falzon has written a pontificating article banging on about “hate” and how this website “spreads hate” – repeating, in other words, the mantra pushed by the Labour Party and by Michael Falzon’s man, Adrian Delia.

Because now reporting the wrong-doing of politicians and describing it that way is “hate”. No, it isn’t. “Hate” is what the Labour Party, using its massive media machine and now all the government means at its disposal, does to me. Hate is what it does to my sons, simply because they are my sons. “Hate” is when the government’s Department of Information is abused to issue official ministerial press statements insulting me and slandering me. That is hate.

Michael Falzon has joined the bandwagon of those who hate me and who spread hatred against me. How could he not? After all, one of my sons was instrumental in collating the data for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that was published worldwide as Swiss Leaks.

And that’s how Malta found out that he had been hiding from his political boss, Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami, around half a million euros which he had stashed away in a private bank in Switzerland. And this while he was a minister of the government that chased people to pay their taxes.

He says he put the money away before 1987, because tax rates in Malta were punitive. I don’t believe that. In the early 1980s, he could have bought up a whole stretch of houses on Sliema’s Tower Road for the liri equivalent of half a million euros. If he was making that kind of money legitimately, why did he give it up to start out in politics? We have only his word for it that he didn’t get that money through corruption when he was a cabinet minister: yes, only his word for it. And now we will never know.

But quite frankly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his fellow minister in that cabinet of government, another shifty piece of work called Ninu Zammit, was also uncovered by Swiss Leaks as having kept money hidden in Switzerland while he sat in the cabinet, only he had far more than Falzon: three million euros. He wouldn’t take questions from the press on where he got that money, but both he and Falzon were at some point responsible for public works. Zammit was given an amnesty on those funds by Muscat’s incoming government in 2013.

Falzon wants us to believe his money didn’t come from corruption in government. Fine. We are free to believe him or not. That is what happens when you cheat on that scale. You don’t have the evidence to prove to people that you were not corrupt, because the act of hiding the money is enough in itself to raise a tsunami of doubt.

Yes, this man sat in the cabinet of government while concealing from his prime minister, his party and the electorate the fact that he had close to half a million euros hidden undeclared in a Swiss bank account. Had this fact somehow been discovered and revealed in the news back then, it would have broken Fenech Adami’s government, and the public would have paid the price.

Then Falzon took advantage of a government amnesty to declare the funds just a few years ago, but will not say which government gave him that amnesty. Of course not, because it was probably Muscat’s.

He pontificates about what is and what isn’t decent behaviour, and appeals to his humble origins to get our sympathy. I never knew either of my grandfathers, he writes; they never owned a bank. Well, what can I say? That’s a damned shame, because had he known them they might have taught him some of the principles his parents clearly failed to do. My grandfathers’ legacy to me was not material, but the very thing which sets me apart from Michael Falzon, other than that, unlike him, I don’t have half a million euros hidden in Switzerland: knowing the difference between wrong and right, and not making excuses for myself when I fail.

Michael Falzon and others like him have been the plague of Maltese politics and social life for decades. They are the sleazy scum that has now scraped itself to the surface and is running the show, pontificating about “hate” while cheating all the way to the bank: in Falzon;s case, HSBC Private Bank in Geneva.

Now Falzon is gagging to install another of his repulsive sort – u ejja, a little bit of money-laundering never hurt anyone – at the helm of the Opposition, so everyone can cheat and back-scratch happily on both sides of the House while the public is screwed over. What a fraud.

My advice to young Maltese people remains the same: leave. You don’t need this. These people are going to carry on poisoning the next few decades until natural causes carry them away, but they will meanwhile be coaching an entire new generation to carry on poisoning it after they are gone with their hatred, greed, chips, sleaze and corruption.

Michael Falzon (back to camera) with Adrian Delia, Hermann Schiavone and Keith Schembri’s defence counsel in the magistrates’ money-laundering inquiries, Edward Gatt.