Category: Mediawatch

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Mediawatch

Persons of Interest

NormanGate ‘exploded’ in the late part of this weekend giving us something to chew on on what would otherwise be a dreary (and very windy) Monday morning. We heard that the extremely irritating (that is admittedly a subjective judgement) ex-anchor on Where’s Everybody shows was held and questioned by the police. After a series of confusing reports we finally got an official reason for his detention : “investigations are under way into the alleged breach of airport security regulations by an immigration officer who photographed a passenger in a restricted area for which the police are responsible. Also, Norman Vella was first told that he would be suspended from his job as an immigration officer but he was later  told that he could report for work this morning.

As with all stories of this kind that unravel over the internet it is hard to pick a set of facts that are certain. It would help to list the facts and quasi-facts as a sort of aide-memoire:

1. Facts 

  • Norman Vella was held and questioned by the police for four hours.
  • Norman Vella’s mobile phone and tablet were confiscated.
  • A group of ex-One TV/Radio employees were passing through customs at the time of the events.
  • Running Commentary had uploaded posts mentioning the abovementioned trip WITHOUT posting any photos.
  • Norman Vella is employed as an Immigration Officer at MIA.

2. Statements made by involved parties

  • The detention was made following a report filed by two persons (NV mentions this in interview).
  • No photos were sent to Daphne Caruana Galizia (DCG expressly states this and challenged TOM reporter Kurt Sansone).
  • No photos were found on the confiscated equipment (NV mentions this).
  • Kurt Farrugia and Ramona Attard claim not to have known of the events (interviewed upon their arrival in the UK).

So we may be dealing with a situation of an Immigration Officer who has violated the rules of his workplace and insofar as that point is concerned there would be no problem if his superiors take the necessary precautions that are proportional to the violation he committed. In truth if there indeed was a report that an Immigration officer has broken any rules of the workplace you would expect an internal investigation, a report and a proportionate punishment should the allegation be proven right.

Once you remove the shackles of partisan subjectivity from before your eyes though it would not be such a tough logical process to notice that there is much that is amiss in the treatment of the obnoxious (anything but erstwhile) ex-TVHEMM presenter. To begin with the frenzy of activity was worked up at the same time (or shortly after) Daphne Caruana Galizia posted two or three posts about the large government delegation of communication officers (or whatever Taghna Lkoll jargon is trendy nowadays) en route to some BBC training in London. The subject matter was and remains very pertinent. Here are ex-party propaganda machine employees now on a government payroll on their way to a conference in London – all expenses paid.

Is it relevant to the public? It’s as relevant as anything related to government or party salaries. This blog has often dealt with the issue of party financing and very recently dealt with the issue of how Labour’s finances were “saved” by the large exodus of employees towards the government payroll. Kurt Farrugia and Ramona Attard do not pass through passport control as private citizens but rather as government employees. Whether their presence was sighted and reported while having their luggage checked or while they were shopping at the duty free section is irrelevant.

Now my gut tells me never to trust Norman Vella. His demeanor when interviewed speaks volumes and his “innocent victim face” ensconced in a short-sleeved shirt two sizes too large was not exactly convincing. Still, there is not much where to get lost this time round. He mentions having nodded (sellem) in the direction of Kurt and Ramona (they are after all ex-colleagues of sorts). It is important since Kurt and Ramona would have been aware of his presence and I am sure that if shortly after they were catching up on the activity on the net – particularly on what they probably refer to as “il-blogg tas-sahhara” they must have made the wrong sort of one plus one.

It is an assumption I know but Occam’s razor, Dr House and Sherlock Holmes would probably agree to this version of events. The “report”, the fact that one of the communication officers works for the Minister under whose remit the police work and the sudden concatenation of news that included the red herring of “photos taken in the immigration area” can only point in one direction.

And this is the dirty part. We have developed what in the US of A is called a “person of interest“. The cool thing that you learn about a “person of interest” in Hollywood criminal series is that law enforcement agencies can opt to classify a person as such rather than as a “suspect” because it gives them more leeway in dealing with him. Less habeas corpus and the like. In our case we still have not got a hard and fast definition or use of “persons of interest” but Norman Vella just got that treatment.

Within minutes of a report that alleged that he snapped some shots at his workplace he was detained and interrogated for four hours. Really? Four? How many times can you ask the question – “did you take a photo ?”. What kind of phone and tablet does Vella have anyway? Is his photo gallery encrypted? Are his email attachments rerouted through Ed Snowden’s servers? And somehow I get the feeling that Daphne Caruana Galizia cannot afford to lie on this one – she did not receive any photos from Vella.

So what are we left with? We are left with intimidation tactics and abuse of police power all of which are intended to protect “inner circle” employees of the Taghna Lkoll generation. Beautiful. Kurt Farrugia and Ramona (use me as you will) Attard. If Vella took no photos then the only hope that some kind of excuse for disciplinary action could be taken fizzles up in smoke.

You’d have to have swallowed a huge amount of Taghna Lkoll pills in order to justify this charade.

In un paese pieno di coglioni ci mancano le palle.

 

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Mediawatch

The Plagiarists

We’ve been there before. This will be a useless post – a hopeless one really. In this post I’ll be pointing out that yet another aspiring politician has put his signature to an article that is full of excerpts that are not his own. You might read it if it tickles your fancy, or you might not. Most probably it will draw a few guffaws and some would go through the motions of tut-tutting for a while. The newspaper in question will probably not bother with the fact that its political contributor is a plagiarist. So why bother?

Well, notwithstanding the miasma of indifference that seems to have become the norm and standard for your average citizen I’ve decided to soldier on – go on the record so to speak. These are the men and women that your political parties will be suggesting that you send to Brussels and Strasbourg to represent you. When these men and women sign their articles in the paper and end it with “is an MEP election candidate on the PL ticket” they are basically looking for the Maltese reaction of: “bravu dan”, “ara kemm kiteb dwar l-Ewropa”, “nahseb jifhem”.

The Malta Independent has quite a history in particular of entertaining this kind of “articles” roughly shod together from bits and pieces over the internet. You can spot them a mile away. They normally carry the kind of title that would have been taken straight from an EU poster for some project and then segue into a series of very tenuously related paragraphs. It’s what you get when your “research” is any old Eu-related document that provides you with chunky “technical-sounding” phrases.

So here is il-Perit Clint Camilleri or rather – an article collated together from a document entitled “Dilemmas in Globalization – Exploring Global Trends and Progressive Solutions”. To be fair it’s a collection of essays for the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and Camilleri lifts extensively from Martin Schultz’s intervention. But he does not tell you does he? He just makes the material his own and that is fraudulent. Why is it fraudulent? Because it makes Camilleri appear to be someone who he is not – someone capable of writing an article about Social Europe in a technical manner.

Should that be important to you? Hell, I’ve given up – you decide. It would not surprise me one bit that this kind of “passing off as one’s own” is accepted as normal and ok behaviour. We’ve been rushing headlong down this path of indifference for quite some time now. Our parties have gotten us used to candidates that amount to nothing much more than hot air and pompous parading hiding behind some University degree or other. All the more fools are we when we persist in voting for them.

The text of Camilleri’s article below can be compared to the text in this pdf.

 

Social Europe

Today we are not only living a financial crisis but a crisis in globalization. The crises started in the financial system but have spread to every aspect of the economy, creating socio-economic disequilibrium. In order to save the financial system governments have invested millions of Euros but the problem is not to save only the financial system by restoring credit, but to sort out the huge structural economic problems which are at the origin of the problem. [J’accuse note – Lifted from introduction to document]

The growing inequality worldwide is at the heart of the problem. This is the most important dilemma we must face. We must decide whether we should restore a system that recompenses those that created the financial crises in the first place or transforming the system which will eventually address those at the bottom of the pyramid. [J’accuse note – also lifted from Introduction]

Some statistics of shame: According to the Eurostat, 59,000 Maltese were at risk of poverty – 14.6 % of the population, according to 2008 figures. ‘At risk of poverty’ is defined as meaning those living in a household with a disposable income that is below the risk-of-poverty threshold, which is set at 60% of the national median disposable income.

Eurostat said that in Malta, 16,000 were ‘severely materially deprived’. Such people could not pay rent/mortgage or utility bills, keep their home adequately warm or face unexpected expenses. They also could not afford to eat meat, fish or protein equivalent every second day an cannot afford a car, washing machine, colour TV or telephone.

If national income had been distributed more equal, with lower profits and higher salaries the overall European economy would have been more stable. If the wealth that was speculated had been fairly distributed in the form of lower prices and higher salaries we would have been able to minimise the effects from the crises.

The crises we are suffering is to a great extent the crises of a model based on the growth of inequality. Salaries which are too low and poverty amongst the middle class has driven credit consumption to the exploding point of debt. Thus credit is no longer a socially and extended and economically solvent request used for investment into new fields of real production. [J’accuse note – slightly paraphrased from intro on page 1]

Increased competitive pressures on the social systems threaten to damage the social cohesion of European societies. In face of the highly mobile global economy nation states have lost their capacity to act alone and to adequately protect social rights. While capital has swept away borders through the single market mechanism, the welfare state has remained trapped with national boundaries. For decades the EU success model was the combination of economic progress with social progress. Then the governing conservative majority in Europe decided to focus on the removal of trade barriers while sometimes neglecting the social dimension. [J’accuse note – page 16 of document]

Thinking in a global dimension has become a pre-requisite for finding solutions. Re-thinking governance and including new levels of governance expands the room for manoeuvre. Growing interdependence between societies and nation states does not only create new categories of problems, it offers the solution too. Nation states alone might not be the best vehicle for mitigating huge changes. The EU is much better equipped for finding solutions and implementing concrete measures in cooperation with other major players. [J’accuse note – page 14 of document]

Now is the time to correct this imbalance. It is time for a new social Europe that places people not the market at the centre of economic activity. Social progress clauses need to be included in every piece of EU legislation and social and environmental impact assessments needs to be taken into account. If Europe again shows its social face it will surely regain the trust and the support of its citizens. [J’accuse note – page 16 of document].

Perit Clint Camilleri is an MEP election candidate on the PL ticket

 

 

Categories
Mediawatch Politics

Luxembourg’s new coat

So the election came and went. Luxembourg’s that is. It came early – some unfathomable scandal to do with phone tapping and the sorts led to the precipitating of ballot consultations – and finished quickly. For southerners like myself who are used to elections being dealt with like some enormous football match complete with hooligan behaviour on the stands, Luxembourg’s national elections was an exercise in sanitised efficiency of the most yawn-inducing kind.

The elections were held on Sunday (yesterday) which also happened to be Mantelsonndag (literally Coat Sunday). Mantelsonndag is the day in which Luxembourgers go out and buy their new winter coat – which means that all the shops have another excuse to open on Sunday. Did this interfere with the fervour of the electoral consultation? Not one bit. Those entitled to vote (it’s less of an entitlement more of an obligation here – you HAVE to vote in Luxembourg) had six hours to go to their allocated booth and pick their candidates of choice in one of four districts (North, South, Centre and East). Polls opened at 8 a.m. and were shut by two in the afternoon, which means you could only just make it for the last order in a restaurant in the city.

With many more parties contesting the elections than in our notoriously bipartisan (+1) home nation you’d expect an interesting level of tension – to say the least. Nothing. At least not outwardly so. Not even the hundreds of billboards (in wood I noticed, très environmentally friendly) with the robotic expressionless faces were subjected to the least of political vandalism. Police on the roads? Are you kidding? People just rushed to the sales in the great shopping centres and forked out some money from Europe’s highest wage packets to update their ski gear and buy the new manteaux. Silence. The four (yes, four) Fiorentina supporters at the Italian joint where we get our weekly fix of calcio probably made the most noise in the whole of Luxembourg on Sunday – and their purple was not for the Pirate Party.

By seven in the evening results started to trickle out and they all but confirmed the predictions with the ruling CSV losing three of its seats in the Luxembourg 60-member parliament and the Greens losing another. The big winners were the Democratic Party who had caused what one of the papers (wort.lu) enthusiastically described as a “wave of blue” (plus four more seats in parliament). Led by the erstwhile Mayor of Luxembour Xavier Bettel the liberal-democrat party made some substantial gains that would give them a strong hand at the negotiating table as Jean-Claude Junker will form a new coalition government – extending his party’s (and his) stay in power beyond the current 18 year record.

The socialist party and left did not make any particular gains while a very interesting development occurred with the newly formed Pirate Party which managed to garner close to 3% of the vote on the first attempt. No seats in parliament for the swashbuckling heroes of liberty but the amount of votes they obtained guarantees them state financing for their next attempt (are you watching Malta?).

Thusly, without too much of a fuss and without any excessive drama, the Grand Duchy got its new coat. The multi-party politics formula seems to work  – and work well – for this tiny nation. Not for them the mass meetings and the carcades… the only time Luxembourg gets to see those is during a World or European cup… then again there’s no Luxembourgers in those carcades – just those noisy southern guests from Portugal, Italy or Greece.

Ah Europe, Unity in Diversity.

Categories
Mediawatch

When justice opens her eyes

There’s a reason why justice is supposed to blind. Lady justice is always portrayed with the scales of balance in one hand, the sword in another and a bandage covering her eyes – the latter a strong symbol of her “blindness”. The reason for this blindness is the fact that before justice everyone is equal – there should be no distinction and no discrimination. There are not two sets of laws that apply to different categories of people.

Today’s judgement by Magistrate Peralta as reported in the papers might mistakenly lead people to begin to believe that justice has opened its eyes. It would be a wrong kind of opening of the eyes because it is the kind that seems to imply that there is a law for one kind of persons (the locals) and another for another kind (foreigners). The phrase “foreigners engaging in crimes will be dealt with seriously” is dangerously equivocal and has hopefully been misinterpreted by the reporting press.

One would hope that whoever engages in crimes is dealt with seriously… no matter what the nationality on their passport. There is a second danger that is inherent in this statement and this is the fact that it encourages the kind of “us and them” talk that until now had been exclusively the domain of our government as it pandered to the populist ideas about the dangers of having too many foreigners among us.

So let’s hope this unhappy statement is clarified and rectified. And remember – on paper at least, “la legge è uguale per tutti”.

Categories
Mediawatch Sport

Football Memories

I hope Roberts Viksne does not mind this but I am posting this documentary that he made as part of his course in video production at the University of Malta. Great work Roberts and thank you for bringing all this information together and presenting it in such a clear and objective manner. For the love of football.

 

Categories
Mediawatch Politics

Flogging passports

It (supposedly) takes quite some time to draft a legal notice and amendments to the Citizenship Act setting up a scheme to sell citizenship – Identity Malta. I am sure that somebody in the Taghna Lkoll government did not hit upon this halfwit idea while perusing through a September edition of the Economist. (Click here: If Austria and Cyprus can do it then why can’t we?). The Draft Legal Notice in question has already been uploaded through the Running Commentary network and we will oblige by adding a link here (out of courtesy of course). So what could have prompted Muscat and his crew to decide that it is a good idea to start selling the Maltese passport like it was some gourmet pastizz for the rich and famous?

The gist of the Economist article linked above could already point you in the right direction as to what kind of clients one can expect when one sets up shop in the market for readily available EU documents (just add cash).

“One category of applicants consists of rich people from emerging economies seeking convenience and security. Many are Chinese, though since the Arab spring demand is growing from the Middle East. A second is made up of citizens of rich countries who wish to disguise their origins when visiting dangerous places.” – Selling citizenship, Papers Please (The Economist, 28th September 2013).

We’ve all heard of people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. That kind of client would not really be in the market for an EU passport that comes tied so easily with national obligations such as the European Arrest Warrant. No sir. The market is out there for people who are rich enough to want to get a foothold into the EU – an EU passport that allows them to roam around the continent and act as EU nationals. The nouveau riches of this world – from Moscow to Guangdong would jump at the opportunity of being considered an EU citizen and this for what they would consider a handful of pennies.

So while we already know that our government is willing to sell a hold in our energy company for a pittance (yep, two Gareth Bales remember) and that the real push behind that memorandum of misunderstanding is the foothold that a Chinese company gets in the European market (see That China Connection) we now discover that the prostitution of national assets does not stop there. This latest move must not only be put in the light of recent events though – it jars even when you look at it from a wider picture and here are a few conclusions that this blog has reached:

1) An EU passport is a good thing to have – part I

For a party that spends most of its time denigrating the EU and speaking of it in the third person plural while emphasising the “Us” vs “them” scenarios this is one hell of a giant step: it is recognising the value of having an EU passport. It actually put a price on it. 650,000 euros and Joe’s your uncle. Would the Labour party have recognised the worth of EU citizenship a decade ago we’d surely be in a much better place – there would be so many more Maltese voters who are not afflicted by a sudden bout of Tourette’s whenever the good old continental grouping is mentioned.

2) An EU passport is a good thing to have – part II

So, having sussed out that there is something advantageous about owning a passe par tout l’EU thingy in hand what do the great thinkers in the Taghna Lkoll fold do? They opt to debase it and sell it to people with cash searching for a convenient base. Mind you it’s not like we did not have similar schemes aimed at attracting fat ducks before – we never gave them a passport though. Even our permanent resident scheme ran into quite a bit of controversy (as did the High Net Worth Individual scheme). Those schemes had an added value that the amount that a person seeking residence needed to invest went to a property owner in Malta – not as a cash payment to the government of Malta. So who are we really in the market for? you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to see this one coming. Għami iżraq as we say in the vernacular.

3) Suddenly we’re not so full up and outnumbered

Not that this probably matters in the Taghna Lkoll Cosmic View of things but here have a government that has been weeping at every available opportunity that our country cannot deal with the influx of more immigrants that we are inundated and that we are practically the victims and nobody will help us. That same government is now setting up shop selling citizenship, yes, selling citizenship to anyone who can afford it. I thought that the Italian government’s token move of awarding citizenship posthumously to the victims of the Lampedusa tragedy was tragicomic but this… well this one takes the cake. There is no shame, no pride either in this Taghna Lkoll government. The way it flings itself from one inconsistency to another while barking at whoever criticises it with feeble excuses based on illogical fallacies is beyond pathetic.

4) Taghna Lkoll?

I saved the best for last. This scheme is yet another dagger in the whole Taghna Lkoll farce. Let us imagine that Malta was one big cake (I know that between iced buns and free for alls Taghna Lkollytes will quickly take to the metaphor) and that Joseph Muscat’s hullabaloo before the election was all about how this cake was for all of us to share rightly and equitably. Let us think for one minute how, always basing ourselves on Labour’s protestations before the election, this cake was half-baked and barely had enough to provide for us all. What has our prime confectioner gone and done? Well, while the cake has not got any larger he has decided to invite guests over to stay and join la grande abbuffata. Yes sir. It’s officially Tagħhom Ukoll now without so much as a bye your leave. But they are rich I hear you say… they pay money…. sure and they will be queuing for those free health services, those free allowances and buying the same property to which every other Maltese national is entitled.

Small ideas for small minds. I guess that really sums it up.

UPDATE

Early feedback to this post shows that there might be more to it than just a Taghna Lkoll ploy. Henley, the firm mentioned in the Economist report might have an interest that goes further back than March of this year.

A pre-Taghna Lkoll conference in Dubai discusses Global Residence & Citizenship Schemes (with Maltese participants).

Reuters on Henley.