How deeply offensive this is now

The proceedings are introduced by Alessandra Pace, whose mother, father, two uncles (her mother’s brothers) and she herself were all put on the public payroll after March 2013: she at the CHOGM Organising Office (she has since resigned), her father Charles Pace on the board of Transport Malta, and her mother Dorothy Pace and Dorothy’s brother Tano Vella Bonnici at Identity Malta, where their other brother Joe Vella Bonnici was made executive chairman.

Cyrus Engerer – we all know how that panned out: sentenced to two and half years in prison (suspended), confirmed on appeal, a big show about standing down from the European Parliament electoral race but then compensated with a specially-invented job as the prime minister’s ‘sherpa’ in Brussels on a salary he could never hope to achieve otherwise, and his boyfriend Randolph Debattista imposed on Marlene Bonnici, Malta’s permanent representative in Brussels, against her will and without her consent as her chef de cabinet. Engerer does not have a security pass to the office because his prison sentence means he does not have security clearance, so his boyfriend, the chef de cabinet, lets him in using his own card.

Then there are Joseph and Michelle Muscat and what is described in this Super One news report as their “storja ta’ imhabba”: we all know how that panned out, too – as a major grab-fest of gimme gimme gimme, or what she memorably described in an interview as “we know how lucky we are and we are going to make the most of these five years”.

Disgusting. How they conned people.