I wrote this a year ago
It was illustrated with a photograph of John Dalli, captioned: “An EU Commissioner, hawking a power station to an EU member state after being in the pay of the seller.”
Just follow the money – all the way to an explanation why Labour and John Dalli are hawking a power station while Malta Today has turned Labour
Published: November 27, 2011 at 12:37pm
The dots have been joined up and we know now what we hadn’t noticed four years ago, when he gave an interview to The Sunday Times in that capacity: that John Dalli was in Sargas’s pay as their adviser.
And now we can say with even more conviction: “Thank God he didn’t become Nationalist leader and prime minister.”
If John Dalli thinks nothing of breaking the rules in the EU Commission’s book by conducting private business and negotiating sales to governments as the advisor to a technology company, then he would have thought nothing of, in his role as prime minister, buying for Malta a power station built and operated by a company that has or had him on board as a consultant.
He can scream, shout, roll around on the floor, turn red in the face and even write to the Columnists Police to complain that he is put upon, but these are serious matters and the questions raised about them are more serious still.
When John Dalli was a Maltese cabinet minister, he thought it perfectly all right to build up an extensive network of personal business contacts in Libya, Malta and elsewhere, using them for his consultancy firm.
He even used this Libyan network as his unique selling point, promoting it on his John Dalli & Associates website and advertising himself as the man to go to for Libyan contacts, before the whole thing blew up in his face last February.
John Dalli even had a criminal brother running around in Libya striking deals and shipping marijuana resin to Malta. We joke about that shipment because it turned out to be green soap, but we have no way of knowing how many real marijuana shipments he might have got away with before the police swooped on his vessel, the Jolly Roger.
So fine, John Dalli isn’t his brother’s keeper, but what must it have looked like when Libyan officials and others had to deal with Bastjan Dalli knowing that he is the Maltese minister’s brother? Bastjan felt so comfortable in Libya that when the police sought to arrest him after the ‘green soap’ cargo was intercepted, he fled there.
The Gaddafi authorities must have thought that our set-up here in Malta was something like theirs. Nobody in Libya would have touched Bastjan Dalli because he is John Dalli’s brother. We know that was the way things worked there.
A man with that kind of brass neck and inability to draw the line between public office and private business – or who thinks that drawing the line means leaving ‘John Dalli & Associates’ in the hands of his daughters while proceeding as normal – should never have been made EU Commissioner.
Just as Sargas plans to do with its power station carbon dioxide, shipping it to Denmark and burying it there, we exported our pollution problem to Brussels and now it’s breaking out of its tomb.
John Dalli knows he gave an interview four years ago in his role as adviser to Sargas, and that this put it on public record. So not only is he so unethical – I will not use the word ‘corrupt’ at this stage, before questions are asked (and answered) about monies he or his firm have received from Sargas for services rendered – as to carry on pushing for Malta to buy this technology, indifferent to the fact that he had become an EU Commissioner in the interim.
He must actually think that it does not matter, that he is perfectly free to act as a broker between Sargas and the Malta government, even though he is an EU Commissioner. Otherwise he would not be so blatant about it.
Let’s be frank here: even as a former cabinet minister, especially one who still had a seat in parliament, he should not have been trying to broker deals between the government and a technology company. Whichever way you slice it, it looks really bad. It is really bad.
The way I see it is that even if the technology is the best in the world, you can’t buy it if a former cabinet minister is paid to sell it and will probably get a cut running into millions. There would be legitimate questions in the public mind and these situations must be beyond suspicion.
The less-than-splendid irony is that the Opposition, which has tied itself up into knots of affected anger about the commission paid to the man who brokered the sale of the current power station project, is helping John Dalli to broker this one and has as good as given its word that when Joseph Muscat is elected to power, the deal will be done.
So now we know that John Dalli has another, far more important, reason to work for the defeat of the Nationalist Party at the next general election. It is not just eight-year-old lingering bitterness at having been outplayed by his rival for the party leadership, but what I now suspect is the lure of a percentage commission on a contract worth hundreds of millions.
It occurs to me that a deal might very well have been struck already. When you marshal all the available facts and information, the question arises as to whether John Dalli has struck a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ bargain with the Labour Party: he helps them defeat Lawrence Gonzi, while they buy the power station he’s selling.
It might seem like a crazy, desperate and corrupt agreement but consider the stakes involved. The Labour Party can’t afford to lose another election, and John Dalli must have a hell of a lot riding on the sale or he wouldn’t be pushing so hard, debasing himself and his official European Commission post on Super One to talk about it while acting like a used-car salesman.
The long and the short of it is that he has behaved like somebody with a vested interest in the sale of this technology because, well, he has a vested interest. Or at least he did in 2007 when he worked for Sargas and took fees, and we have no reason to suppose that things have changed since, judging by his antics and his persistent obsession.
“Follow the money,” I told a friend who wondered out loud why Dalli is so keen to have Malta buy this power station, as we watched him compromise and embarrass himself on Joe Grima’s Super One TV show.
And now I could slap myself because in his incredible stupidity, Anglu Farrugia gave the game away on Bondi+, but I was so busy laughing at his ‘tucks fors’ and his ‘semplici, cara daqs il-kristall’ that I failed to log the significance of his answer to Bondi’s question about Labour’s plan for lowering water and electricity rates.
“Il-pjan ta’ John Dalli,” Anglu Farrugia said, without thinking first, and when pressed further by a completely startled Bondi, he fudged and fumbled and beat a retreat.
Instead of twitching our antennae, we laughed some more because we thought what a bunch of idiots they are with John Dalli’s pie-in-the-sky esoteric plans.
But it isn’t pie-in-the-sky, is it? It’s real, and that fool Farrugia unwittingly let the cat out of the bag, only to have us not notice until Dalli began promoting Sargas heavily.
If this is the case, then Labour are not just idiots, but it’s even scarier than that. They’re mind-bogglingly corrupt.
Here at last we might have the explanation why Malta Today metamorphosed overnight into the English-language newspaper the Labour Party always wanted but never had.
I could never work out why a newspaper which prided itself on independent insight suddenly began wielding a violent and madly biased axe against the government, the Nationalist Party and its leader in particular, while leaving Labour and its leader completely free of scrutiny.
When was the last time you read a story about the Labour Party or its leader in Malta Today?
We have a major scandal on our hands, and the scandal will be greater still if we proceed as normal on the understanding that we expect no better of the likes of Labour, Malta Today and John Dalli.
How good it is to be able to put all of Dalli’s sickening posturing as the ‘father confessor’ of trouble-making government backbenchers like Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Jesmond Mugliett in its proper perspective.
I trust that when they helped him make trouble for Lawrence Gonzi, they were unaware that he stands to profit from Gonzi’s defeat and the election of Joseph Muscat, who will buy ‘his’ power station. But that might be setting too high a standard of behaviour for people like Jeffrey Pullicino and Jesmond Mugliett.
Bring on the general election. I can’t wait to help vote Labour out – again. Even if my vote is lost in a sea of enthusiasm for Joseph and for John Dalli’s power station, then at least my conscience will be clear.
I’ll have no truck with scum like that.
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Maybe… just maybe, John is-snus Dalli was given the Dom Strauss-Kahn treatment and railroaded out of his job.
Corruption is not only a southern European or Mid East and African thing no matter what the self proclaimed moral and racial superior Northerners want you to think.
‘We have a major scandal on our hands, and the scandal will be greater still if we proceed as normal on the understanding that we expect no better of the likes of Labour, Malta Today and John Dalli.’
No wonder Labour spent the better part of 2012 gunning for an early election, it is a race against time. If one had to observe where Labour chooses to go on the rampage, there’s always a vested interest, if it can be called Labour at all.
The other two great projects, the democratisation of rehabilitation and parking carry similar implications, subjected to identical perverse mechanisms.
Joseph thinks this to be swell, the absence of commitment, let alone clear statements of intent not incompetence but sly calculation.
The repeated snide attempts at the financial sector, once a week on Maltastar, worrying.
Truly ‘un associazione a delinquere’, what remains to be seen is what ‘di stampo’ it is. The saddest thing is how they consider business to be inherently immoral.
Reading this article made me to knock my head against a concrete wall.
I just cannot forget the unnumbered mass meetings I went to between 1979-1987. Sunday after Sunday I used to drive to the meeting point, oblivious of my growing children and the need to give my family a Sunday rest that they deserved.
I used to relish the thought that John Dalli would be one of our stalwarts that would put back Malta on its feet. Do not get me wrong. I’m not saying that I ever regret supporting such a great party.
On the contrary, I feel so proud of the little I contributed to the total change we’ve experienced during the past 25 years.
But little did I ever think (and so did thousands) that I would ever read an article like this on one of the protagonists in whom we had so much faith. Every Palm Sunday and Good Friday we read that there was another man who concocted a plot for gain to bring down his Master. We all know his name. And after seeing what he had done, we all know what he did.
The lodge of conspirators has a web of activity going and a hidden agenda. It is indeed a shame conspiring to bring down your own political party and going to such lengths in your endeavours and betrayals.
Business and politics must not go together. If they did, then we might as well go back to the command economy. Nationalize all again and let the government administrative do the wheeling and dealing.
Business and politics have become one and the same with these individuals. It’s the manifesto we’re not allowed to see.
As for going to great lengths, perhaps it’s because Labour cannot lose this election as they cannot afford it. What other reason can there be?
It should be obvious (but evidently it is not) that apart from forcing Dalli’s resignation (justified or not) this is also a damaging serious attack on Malta’s reputation internationally, on its citizenry and on the prime minister who chose Dalli to represent Malta abroad ousting Dr Joe Borg who, up to then, had served us so creditably in Brussels.
It seems that the current political saga is no less than a coordinated conspiracy to overthrow Gonzi and led by John Dalli for financial gain all round. Shame.
The EU have outed Dalli as crooked.
So that is him finished in Malta, yes?
Don’t be so sure. Watch out for updates on Malta Today and Super One’s Bla Agenda and TX.
As soon as I heard the news, the only thought that came to mind was: Mur afdah mas-Sargas.
Good riddance, pity our reputation went to the dogs thanks to him.
The *first* thought…