Opinion • December 07 2003

Hogwash Mr Mintoff

In no Christmas mood, Saviour Balzan takes Mr Mintoff to task for his life-long obsession in being painted as the Saviour of Malta

Needing some time for myself, I chose to take two days off. So I switched off that horrible contraption called the mobile and disappeared. When I returned to the office I was informed that the court marshal had been seeking me desperately because il-perit Mintoff wanted the libel case instituted against me heard with urgency.
The immortal who is planning to go down as the guy who did everything for his country is anxious to clear his name in the BICAL scandal, even though he chose to remain silent and not respond to our many allegations about the bank’s saga.
Dom Mintoff is not only one of the most arrogant politicians Malta has ever seen, he also makes himself completely inaccessible. In my long years in journalism, Mr Mintoff has always refused to answer questions and always pretends to be permanently suffering from a hearing problem. He also refuses interviews and considers everyone to be either inferior or a mutant.
When we attempted to ask him about BICAL over the phone, he muttered: “Le, le … mhux hekk, hija, l-affarijiet,” and then cut the phone.
Now, the man who considers himself the Saviour of the nation wants to leave the imprint that he was Malta’s easy going prime minister doing his sacred duty for the country in the seventies
Hogwash, Mr Dom Mintoff.
Today, as we kick off our series on the National Bank saga. Another bank that was nationalised in the spirit of Nasserism that struck Malta in the early seventies we come to terms, once again with the cruelty of Mr Mintoff’s policies.
Mr Dom Mintoff was far luckier when it came to the National Bank than with BICAL Bank, here he discovered that the principal shareholders were not as resilient as the Pace brothers.
He rode roughshod over the National bank ruining the lives of many families. Mr Mintoff is welcome to take me to court on this one too. If the court expects me to call witnesses to confirm my assertion, then I would be constrained to exhume the corpses of the deceased principal shareholders, many of whom died before their natural time was up, because of the worries they endured in those infamous Mintoff years.
With the National Bank Mr Mintoff has no excuses of alleged fraud. In the BICAL bank saga, the fraud exercised by the Nationalist party treasurer who happened to be a senior Bank manager at BICAL sparked off a column of falling dominoes that led to the fiasco and scandalous sell out first by controller Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and then Emanuel Bonello.
In my younger days when we all had the right disposition to listen to long boring sermons from the pulpit, we vividly remember priests reminding us that there is no justice on this earth.
The more I hear of Mr Mintoff, the more I believe that what they said was very close to the truth..The Press Club has rekindled a press ethics commission chaired by a former judge renowned for being a bastion of conservatism. Perhaps the first complaint they could look into is the leakage of private correspondence between myself and the Press Club to a former disgruntled employee best remembered for his laziness, incompetence, plagiarism and inability to write English. The contents of my private correspondence with the defenders of journalists were courteously published on the letters pages of The Times last week under the title: Sour Grapes, Sour Grapes indeed.