Oh, how nice for him! Mark Micallef is ambassador to Madrid.
Sant’s ambassador to Washington in 1996 is Muscat’s ambassador to Spain in 2013. He couldn’t get Washington again because his cousin Marisa had bagged that already.
Three public servants have sent me, separately, posting order 5/2013 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, listing the new ambassadors and the terminations of other appointments.
Nothing new there, except for the news that Mark Micallef is the new ambassador to Madrid. And that Labour microphone-man Ray Azzopardi isn’t on the list as the new ambassador to Brussels.
Mark Micallef is Marisa Micallef’s first cousin (their fathers are brothers). When Alfred Sant was elected prime minister in 1996, he made Mark ambassador to Washington. He was recalled when Eddie Fenech Adami was re-elected 22 months later.
Mark was given the appointment in 1996 in return for services rendered.
He used to hang around with us all the time while keeping his real political views secret. We only found out when he got his iced bun in 1996 – and then we suspected that he had been leaking information and gossip.
I have cut him dead since then – 17 years.
The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago, when we crossed paths: he leaving the Dragonara hotel and me entering it, each walking stoney-faced past the other.
A few minutes after I’d entered the lobby I was speaking on my phone when I noticed him, out of the corner of my eye, sneaking back in to see who I was meeting. I wasn’t meeting anyone.
I waited until he was right behind me and then I spun round to face him, still talking on my phone, with raised eyebrows. He got terribly flustered, flapped his hands in confusion, turned round and waddled out as quickly as he could.
‘Great ambassador,’ I thought, having heard the rumours already because his boasts had come down the grapevine.
Joseph Muscat couldn’t send him back to Washington, as he has sent Vince Camilleri (Sant’s appointee to Paris in 1996) back to Paris, because his cousin Marisa had nabbed that already in exchange for switching to Labour as loudly as possible.
So Madrid it is, then. Povra Malta.
Read the appointments here posting_order_05_2013
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Ray Azzopardi and Brussels are not mentioned. Perhaps this is just the first batch of ambassadors.
Yes, many more botches to come
What happened to the Very Reverend Monsignor?
There are other posts which have not been mentioned.
Did you notice that Frasier became FraZier?
Cannot expect better from amateurs, can you?
No doubt he speaks impeccable Spanish and understands the country and its politics, economy etc. then. We all love meritocracy, don’t we.
What a list !
X’cuc hu Henry Kissinger.
Are any of these people career diplomats or are they all PL supporting amateurs?
Charles Stafrace, the new Ambassador to Athens, is a retired civil servant, who was appointed up to DG at OPM during the previous administration. He served as advisor to Mario Cutajar, the new Principal Permanent Secretary up to a few weeks ago.
Ray and Monsignor are still baking at Serkin. I know of a couple who might be eagerly awaiting a bite in the early hours of the weekend.
No surprise in Canberra for choosing the MLP Rep in Australia Charles Muscat for these last 20 years. Probably not to the liking of ex-Consul General and Socialist diehard Lorry Dimech, but George Vella surely has selected the PL apparatchiks for these posts to ensure the propaganda content in their speeches.
So Tweedledee can have his suit of his choice when he visits the new ambassador’s Canberra mens’ retail shop under the watchful eye of Michelle who used to be escorted by the new Canberra VIP while on the PL election campaign.
Charles Muscat is no relation to Joseph Muscat. He is a down to earth guy and not stupidly crass like that man Forace of the Mintoff era. We now wait to see the choice of Consuls to service our communities,
I can tell you it is old Labour all over again. Ajma xi pjacir.
I used to meet Mark in the early eighties and he was very anti-Labour then. I never understood how he turned Labour.
[Daphne – Well, as we discovered in 1996, he didn’t ‘turn’ Labour but always was. He used to hang around, give parties, go to parties, spy and eavesdrop, always with people who were definitely not Labour, and was rewarded for it by Labour with the ambassadorship to Washington. I used to see him once a week at least, at one party or another, lunch, supper, whatever.
A birthday party I had in the summer of that year ended up on the front page of the Labour Party newspaper KullHadd (making it sound like it was the most glamorous thing in Beverley Hills, when it was just an ordinary thing). I spent a month trying to work out who of the just 80 people who were there would have done such a thing, and when the new ambassador to Washington was announced, the mystery was cleared up. I have spent the last 17 years cutting him dead, but fortunately rarely need to do so as most other people I knew at the time followed suit and cut him out of their lives so I have rarely seen him in all this time.
I find snake-in-the-grass behaviour and sleazy disloyalty/betrayal, in whatever form, to be the ultimate transgressions and the best indicator of bad character. This is not about politics but about underhandedness.
And when I look back, it was all right there anyway, had any of us bothered to look: his good relationship with PM Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and his work with him and the dubious Emanuele di Savoia on the ‘Manoel Island Project’ which ended with the change of government in 1987, to his undying anger and resentment, and his continued talk of it. It was wilful blindness on our part not to see him for what he really was: somebody who hated and resented us all and was only pretending.
In short, not a nice or reliable man at all, no integrity, and in Madrid he will almost certainly have his eye on the main chance, for himself. This is my own view, but it is a well-observed one, from personal experience.]
Forgive me for asking, but why exactly did your birthday party in 1996 end up on the newspaper? That sounds so strange!
[Daphne – Not really. What IS strange is how the Labour Party has managed to sustain its level of obsession with me for two full decades and counting. You’d think they’d have lost interest in a lone newspaper columnist by now, but no. They have taken bunny-boiling and pathological fixation to a fine art. I have newspaper cuttings from 1991 in which they say the exact same things about me that they are saying now, with the key difference that back then their idea of an insult was calling me ‘skeletru’ and ‘xkupa’ and ‘gozz ghadam’ and now, two decades down the line, they call me fat instead. They are so pathetic and pre-Enlightenment that it is beyond belief. I must say that all this has taught me what hell women with my personality must have gone through 200 years ago in Maltese villages, if Maltese villagers behave like this today. No wonder they ended up tortured, jailed and burned at the stake for consorting with the devil.]
“,,,,,,,,,,,,,, to beguile the time.
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t” – Lady Macbeth
The news making rounds in Sydney is that the ex NSW Education Minister, now pensioner, John Aquilina is to be named Malta’s Ambassador to India.
A very proud Maltese-Australian and very decent man but couldn’t we have a native Maltese younger energetic person from the foreign service to build up expertise in this huge country?
The top post should be held only by the most competent from Malta’s foreign service.
Pensjonanti, monsinjuri, travel agents, DJs, prezentaturi tal-mass meetings Laburisti, u issa ukoll Maltin ta’ barra. A farce.
Marisa and Mark: as self-serving and opportunistic as each other. And such lonely people – so many acquaintances but I doubt they have any true friends. Who can trust either of them?
Ray Azzopardi is not on the list because the Belgian Authorties have not sent their agrement.
This means that they have not yet sent their approval/acceptance to have him in Brussels representing Malta. The delay is significant. Their refusal will be even more so.
This is one of the most random appointments ever to take place in Malta’s diplomatic history.
Exquisite credenza.
F*cking posers, the whole lot of them. They perpetuate social class hatred amongst the masses and yet they jump on the bandwagon at the first bloody opportunity.
Can anyone see the irony? Are any journalists around? What does the censorious video-blogger at Malta Today think?
I shall not enter into any personal comments, but the Opposition should establish through PQs whether any appointee has a business interest that might involve a conflict of interests in the country where s/he has been appointed.
I do regret that, it seems, that the Labour Party has reverted to the practice of the MLP of appointing the party representative in a foreign country as the nation’s ambassador. This can only lead to division among the Maltese community. In one case it also damaged bilateral relations when our ambassador could not hide his support for the local Labour party that had lost the election.