Fading blue

From the fighting on the political frontline in the eighties with
Tal-Gakketta Blu, Charles Demicoli now keeps at arm’s length from the party he was ready to die for. But his words remain loaded like a machine gun

Charles Demicoli is just three months away from his 60 birthday but he doesn’t really show it. The only thing, perhaps, that gives you a hint he is ageing is his retreat from public life. But even when he decides to make a brief reappearance, mostly through the occasional letters to the editor, he makes it known he is in shape, just like in the good old days.
Case in point is the reigning port chaos, where a multitude of hands have been siphoning off all sorts of fees from importers making a travesty of the word ‘competitiveness’ – which without any hint of irony happens to be the official name of the ministry in charge of this racket.
“It’s nothing but daylight robbery,” Demicoli said a couple of weeks ago about the port workers’ empire which is supposedly in for some drastic reforms.
He was speaking as chairman of Kordin Grain Terminal, the state-owned depository of imported grain and cereals which is billed thousands of Liri for every cargo reaching our shores by port workers and cargo handlers for literally doing nothing.
This is because the grain company has special machinery that unloads the cargo off the ship and transfers it to its silos, and yet it still has to pay the full fees as if cargo handlers were physically unloading the grain in sacks and carrying it to the stores.
Daylight robbery indeed: Kordin Grain Terminal pays Lm1,695 for a 15,000 tonne freight meant for transhipment. If the same cargo is meant for local consumption, then fees soar up to a staggering Lm17,000.
“They’re supposed to be a gang of eight workers, but they’re never the full complement,” Demicoli says. “They’re maybe two or three, and all they do is to sweep the ship’s hold so that our Bobcat picks up the remaining grain. We’re basically paying them for nothing.
“I once wrote to Minister Censu Galea, just to get him to know about the situation. I told him I don’t need them and that I can work without them. If I was told I could do without them I wouldn’t use them. In fact when we had that famous ‘Issa Daqshekk’ strike a couple of years ago we still went ahead with our work without any port workers. I had received a phone call from the director of ports who told me that I was breaking the law. I told him I knew and I intended to go on breaking it. About 30 minutes later I received a phone call telling me to go ahead.”
Demicoli does not disclose who phoned him the second time, but now Minister Censu Galea wants to break the racket, or at least make fees more decent.
“I don’t know how it is being carried out,” Demicoli says about the impending port reform. “I know there were some meetings between very important stakeholders but as usually happens in this country nobody says a thing. I would say port workers are essential for the country but there should be competition and they should only be used when they are needed. Otherwise inflation will keep going up with these kind of prices.
I import grain myself at Federated Mills. It is costing me thousands more to import, for nothing, because Kordin Grain Terminal’s costs ultimately go on to the clients.”
It is one of those mammoth tasks for Galea, dismantling a labyrinthine dynasty that has crippled Malta’s business for ages, but Demicoli believes the minister can manage it.
“There needs to be either competition or a regulator,” he says. “If you’re going to operate as a monopoly you need a regulator. There’s a regulator for everything how can you not have a regulator for this crucial sector?”
Meanwhile Kordin Grain Terminal is up for privatisation, as announced in the last budget speech.
“As chairman here I have helped the government compile the necessary documents for privatisation, but then I got out of it. I know the process is ongoing. I think government will soon make a public call, I think it’s a matter of weeks, not months. I know government is moving ahead, for sure, but it’s not my responsibility. That’s up to the Privatisation Unit and MIMCOL.”
Suddenly, his voice sounds exactly like Austin Gatt’s – “one of the best organisers the PN ever had”, his long-time ally from the days of Tal-Gakketta Blu and ideological soul mate.
“If it were up to me I would privatise everything,” he says. “When you privatise, things start working better. In the case of Kordin Grain Terminals we have always operated commercially. Since I took over in 1990 I never had any interference from any minister, and when I had an issue with the government I pointed it out. If this company is privatised it can get better not because it’s the government’s but because foreign traders might buy it and bring more business.”
The company has 20 workers in all and Demicoli says “there shouldn’t be any problems” of redundancies when the company is sold to private owners.
“We don’t have one extra worker, and we never had,” he says.
Away from the grey and dull heavy machinery in Laboratory Wharf, Demicoli concedes he has had a colourful life, from police inspector sacked by the Labour government “in the public interest” to a Nationalist front liner in the turbulent eighties and just up to a couple of years ago on the hot seat as the Transport Authority’s chairman.
“I had a colourful life, yes,” he says. “Now I’m very much cut off from public life, though I still feel I have a lot of things to say and at times you feel some frustration. But I’m almost 60 so …”
He does not finish the sentence but it is clear he is particularly cut off from the PN.
“I’ve worked a lot in the party, since the days when I was declared public enemy number one by Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici,” he says. “The party has changed totally, like everything in life. I saw then prime minister Fenech Adami growing within the party, and the party grew with him, but he is out and with him a lot of others. I do not expect the new prime minister to keep the same people there were before. The world changes. As secretary generals I worked with Louis Galea and Austin Gatt, and a little bit with Lawrence Gonzi. I worked a little bit with Joe Saliba too, but I mean, I have so many other things to do in life and things that interest me that I’m quite happy I’m not involved in the party any longer.”
Then he adds: “I’m a lifelong member of the Nationalist Party; if there is the need for me to do anything I will do it.”
Does he feel alienated from the PN?
“Alienated to a certain point. First of all we’re two years away from the election and I don’t think the prime minister will call an election before the term expires. There’s no need to call it earlier, I honestly don’t see any need. Then when the election approaches one sees what needs to be done but one also has to appreciate that I’m getting old now.”
It is hard to get Demicoli’s frank judgement of Gonzi and his secretary general. He keeps saying he is “absolutely not involved in the party” right now and that people are always bound to grumble.
“I follow politics but I don’t follow the party any longer, also because I’m not that close to the people leading the party now,” he says.
However he does feel strongly about John Dalli’s bitter marginalisation within the party.
“I worked for John Dalli. He is a great friend of mine. If it were up to me I would have done the same as Fenech Adami had done with Guido de Marco, I would have made him deputy leader. That way the party would have been absolutely united. But it didn’t happen. Was it wrong? I don’t know.”
Demicoli himself was surprisingly shown the door by Gonzi’s new Cabinet when he was removed from chairman of the Transport Authority two years ago, just after Jesmond Mugliett was handed the roads and transport ministry from Censu Galea.
“I don’t think I wasn’t kept there because of Mugliett,” he says when I tell him a lot of people were surprised this blue-eyed boy was being removed by his party. “I had already been there for two years, I offered my resignation at the end of the year and the prime minister accepted it.”
He brushes off controversy by saying it was a “blessing in disguise”.
“I was losing a lot of time there, and it didn’t make much sense for me,” he says. “I have a lot of things to do. You don’t make any money from there, you just get Lm6,000 a year. To me it was a blessing in disguise.”
I tell him that as transport authority chairman he was in charge of two national disasters that nobody seems to be able to solve: roads and buses.
“When I joined the Transport Authority it didn’t exist in reality, it was only there on paper,” he says by way of explanation. “In two years I created it and it started functioning. I can’t agree with you on roads – they are being reconstructed all over, but one has to appreciate that we have so many bad roads that you can’t just decide to arrange half of them at once. We don’t have the money, the resources, and you will create a gridlock if you did that. Over the years everyone ignored the roads, now they’re being done. You can’t do more than is being done at present. Everywhere is jammed with traffic in the morning.”
Buses, on the other hand, “are a big problem”, he admits.
Indeed, the authority has never managed to revamp the public transport service except through some patchwork. Even worse, the authority made an investment of Lm1.1 million on a supposedly “state of the art” bus ticketing system that had over 2,000 faults in a year and a half and registered Lm160,000 in revenue losses in its first four months of operation in a clear warning sign that drivers, ticket sellers and some commuters were defrauding the system from day one.
“Hold on a second,” he says as I start listing the terrible shortcomings of the ticketing system installed and maintained by security company Alberta. “The decision to install the bus ticketing machines and the tender for the project were issued before I joined ADT, so I have no comments to make.”
The system was installed however under his chairmanship and he could see it running from its first day of operation.
“Yes and I saw the initial teething troubles it was giving us. I don’t know if those problems are still there, I have no idea,” he says.
But what is your judgement of the system?
“I have no judgement.”
The transport authority log book leaked last year to MaltaToday shows there were more than 2,000 faults in a year and a half.
“What kind of faults are they? Major? Minor?”
All kinds of faults were registered crashing the system daily, from data chips going blank to money disappearing from the ticket vending machines.
“I don’t know. I can’t comment.”
I tell him that even worse, the system did not entice people to use public transport and patronage actually went down.
“It seems this country has a culture of not using public transport.”
Isn’t it part of the authority’s mission to encourage public transport?
“Well if you take for example the route from St Julians to Valletta. Did you know that in 10 minutes you can reach from St Julians to Valletta, with a bus passing by every minute? Shouldn’t buses be full up with passengers? So is all public transport disastrous? I just mentioned an example that can’t be better than it is.”
Still, Demicoli did not manage to reach an agreement with the Public Transport Association, which unites bus owners and drivers against Transport Authority in every change to public transport it plans to introduce.
“I know I have a strong character and I’m a rough person, but it’s very difficult to negotiate with them,” he admits. “To really bring change, government has to decide it wants to enter a period of strife and carry out the reforms. The only way to do it is to fight it out and get prepared for some strife.”
And wasn’t there the political will to do that when you were chairman?
“I won’t answer that.”
He speaks nonchalantly about his failure to be reappointed by Mugliett when asked how he took it.
“Like everything else in life: with a pinch of salt. I’ve been working here and there, I’ve been in so many positions … I think the worst thing that happened to me was when I was sacked from the police corps, on grounds of public interest.”
The eighties is a subject Demicoli talks gladly about.
“Pullicino (Lawrence, the former police commissioner found guilty of the murder of Nardu Debono in the police depot) had been trying to sack me for a year but he had no pretext, so they resorted to ‘the public interest’ to get rid of me. I was sacked in October 1981 with effect from 21 September, Independence Day. The idiot thought I would break down because of that but for me it was an honour to be sacked on that day.”
That was his turning point, which eventually saw him more militant than ever with the party he wanted in government. Ironically, the Nationalist government eventually promoted corrupt police officers, with the exception of Pullicino.
“It’s water under the bridge now,” he says.
Weren’t you disappointed?
“Of course I was. Some of them even framed up people. Yes I was very disappointed but it’s all over now.”
After the police corps, Demicoli ended up in leading Tal-Gakketta Blu – the Blue Jackets – a PN group of militant activists whose fame reached mythical proportions amid some serious paranoia on the Labour camp.
The whole myth was created after Austin Gatt – then secretary general – and Gejtu Cuschieri (il-Hajta) decided to identify district leaders at the counting hall for the 1981 election by buying them blue jackets from Emmanuel Said of Valletta.
“After that, a policeman on duty had set Said’s door on fire for selling us the jackets,” Demicoli says. “I won’t mention his name but I know it for a fact.”
For the 1981 election, Austin Gatt managed to get “first class people” to monitor the process at the Ta’ Qali counting hall.
“Austin Gatt really showed the best of his organisational skills. We terrorised the Labour Party with our organisation. The police were behind our backs with machine guns while we were counting votes from behind the perspex.
“What was our duty? If we were organising a mass meeting we wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be beaten up or anything. At that time you could get beaten up for sneezing. We had to organise everything.”
Did they ever use arms?
“Arms? No, never.”
Not even carry them?
“No. I can’t answer for others but I never carried any. And those who were close to me were not stupid. You only carry weapons to use them, otherwise you don’t carry them with you. The police used arms against the people, not us.”
Demicoli also made history when as editor of Mhux fl-Interess tal-Poplu he had to faces charges of breach of parliamentary privilege for an article. He lost the case, even at the Constitutional Court, but then won it at the European Court of Human Rights – the first case in Strasbourg to be won by a Maltese citizen against the Maltese government.
Demicoli himself admits that nothing will turn the clock back now, not even a Labour victory, although he is wary of Alfred Sant. Fair enough, his blue may be fading, but it will never fade out.