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I apologise if this short communication is in English, and not in Maltese. Since MaltaToday is published in English, I am obliged to share with you these few words in English.
I enclose a cheque of Lm2,000, after one of your lawyers called on us to pay up. Grudgingly signed by myself and Roger de Giorgio. I trust you will not forward the money to any charity, but will add them to one of your investments, befitting for a socialist leader who worked incessantly at the impression that he was corporate capitalism’s arch-enemy, and that we should be the same.
The Court’s fine, as you very well know, was raised from Lm250 to Lm2,000 by the Appeals Court judge Philip Sciberras.
It is pertinent to point out that in the whole news story about the Bical Bank, you chose never to answer any of my questions. In the media world, the fact that one does not answer questions does not mean that one cannot follow a story.
It was only after Bical Bank founder and boss Cecil Pace appeared on Super One and confronted Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and repeated the same words he had said in MaltaToday, that you started to show some concern for a news story that had been published weeks before.
When you were asked questions you came up with that typical sad excuse that you were not feeling well, and that you had problems in listening to conversations on the phone.
Over the last 25 years you have used the same excuse to deter the press from asking you questions. You have been sick all these years even though you are the fittest 90-year-old I have yet to meet.
Your manners with people and politics is legendary, and so is your way of dealing and using the press. Your short romance with dodgy Nationalist journalists during the debacle with Alfred Sant, is something that cannot be forgotten. Back then, you strangely regained your long-lost energy to invite people into your den in Tarxien, and treat them to your tantrums and ideological drivel – stories about European history and the rise and fall of socialism, are and were repeated ad nauseam to each and every listener.
Everyone has had to suffer but yet, they continue to be enthralled by you, because no one has been around as long as you have been. No one has been so charismatic.
The Bical story will have to be retold in the light of the facts and in the shadow of the reforms that took place in the early seventies. That the Bical Bank was not run according to fiscal accounting norms, is not in question. But at the time Bical Bank could have continued operating. The same fate the Bical Bank suffered was imposed on the National Bank, which had no fiscal anomalies. No problems. Just a clog in the wheels of the banking sector.
Nationalisation was on the cards and in your mind, and nothing stopped you from implementing your dream.
In the very end, a bank with millions in assets was torn apart, its depositors left without their money, the management of the assets left to a group of liquidators with little understanding of their value. The men who ran Bical, Cecil and the late Henry Pace, were sent to prison to serve a full 14 and nine-year sentence respectively in jail, far longer than some of the hardened criminals and murderers who got away with far less.
In our news stories we revealed various aspects to the Bical Bank that showed the state of the bank before its operations were closed down. It reveals the mechanics at the Central Bank and Finance ministry and listed the numerous examples of political intervention that was abnormal to say the least. You contest this, but the time-line and the events do not.
But you are not used to being controlled, so you feel uncomfortable when reportage uncovers the truth: your disdain for the press is such that you pumped adrenaline into Labour thugs. Later led by il-Fusellu they burnt down the Times in 1979. The rest is history.
You had argued that Bical was cash-dry, but your finance minister Guze Abela had cashed all his savings five days before the bank’s closure. Why he had to close his account with Bical Bank five days before the closure of the bank by the Central Bank beats me.
Worse was still to happen. After Bical’s closure, the dismantling of an empire took place. Cecil Pace employed 3,000 employees and his companies owned innumerable properties and hotels. The Excelsior, the hotel later to become Les Lapins, Comino Hotel, Castille Hotel and all the companies including car retail and manufacturing industries, together with boats and vessels, were sold for a pittance. The vultures of course moved in and did not leave any leftover morsels.
Like many others, I was fed with legends about you, and grew up to adore you. I was a prototype “had-to-be-a-socialist”.
Until the grey cells took over the perceptions inherited from my peer group. The posse of ministers that followed you, from the likes of the virginal likes of Patrick Holland to Lorry Sant, confirmed the level of your governance. It was bad governance. It was not incompetent but competent in its corrupt and nepotistic ways.
The police run by Cachia and later Lawrence Pullicino, and public broadcasting by Pellegrini, reconfirmed your passion for fomenting confusion and mediocrity in your midst.
The death knell you applied to education, first under the bizarre captaincy of Agatha Barbara, and later Philip Muscat, cannot but be applauded by those who wished for a cultural revolution on the same line as Beijing 1966.
In foreign policy you unleashed the vision of megalomaniac, thinking that Malta was at the centre of the world.
You confused nationalism with patriotism, insularity with protectionism, and non-alignment with neutrality.
Until a few years, I have to admit that it was a love-hate relationship. The love dimension has long evaporated.
I can no longer accept the argument that the reforms you introduced expunge you from all your mistakes. There are several myths about your policies, but they are generally wrong: you were an elected, angry extremist who governed with an iron fist and instigated divisive politics that left more harm than good.
The bad elements that you have institutionalised in the system remain unforgivable.
The disruption in the quality of our life, the Nasserian trait in your reforms, your flirtation with totalitarian regimes, your tolerance of violence, and your habit of surrounding yourself with sycophants and thugs are not legendary but facts.
Your obsessions had to become the nation’s – from picking capers as a viable industry, to making it unlawful to use the word “Malta” abroad.
Throughout your lifetime, no one dared pen your life history – you made it virtually impossible for anyone to bring together the thousands of memories that made your life a legend in a Mediterranean setting.
Your life turned out to be a nightmare for hundreds.
With your grotesque buckle, you offered a colourful representation of an irreverent prime minister in the middle of the Med. You were the laughing stock of the international press. When they criticised you, you would ban them from Malta. For years The London Times was banned from Malta. Your tolerance for criticism was celebratory.
You preached autarky and zero-tolerance for trade imbalances. When Japan and France did not match their export with our import quotas, you blocked trade with these two countries.
You tantalised the masses with your eloquence, and in the process helped rebuild the Nationalist party by giving them the opportunity to create a leader – Eddie Fenech Adami – and galvanise a popular opposition. You did worse: you destroyed the possibility of a New Labour. You expected the upcoming Labourites to pay homage to you like some kind of Ayattolah.
You did the unthinkable: you offered your sound-bites to the Nationalist media and served as their prime campaign’s icon in the 1998 elections, driving out Labour for good or for worse, into opposition.
In your long diatribes from your abode, a dark, ugly and tasteless melange of antiquated and kitsch artefacts, you entertained everyone, including yours truly. You did not hide your dislike for Alfred Sant and Evarist Bartolo. And you chose to surround yourself with the same loyal groupings of yes-men.
I recall the meetings in 1998 when you encouraged some from Alternattiva Demokratika to set up a new socialist party and then suddenly abandoned them. It was so typical of you.
You played for the media, when you invited people to your house, and the media would strangely get word of it and then you start a game of hide-and-seek.
The latest episode was Josephine Attard Sultana’s visit, held at your insistence and filmed by the Nationalist TV after a friendly leak of course, and the next day l-orizzont was told in a rather typical and muddled way that you never had showed your solidarity with her. So ironical, for someone who did away with Joe Attard Kingswell and did more to destroy the GWU as a union. Surprising, that you found words of sympathy for Attard Sultana and not for the late Attard Kingswell.
Dom Mintoff, you are 90, but that should not diminish your responsibility for having landed this country into a spiral of your own Mintoffian mediocrity, qualities that were eventually taken up by every segment of Maltese society, including the Nationalist party.
I am encouraged by many to write a biographical history of your life. It is a gargantuan task that would require days on end of painstaking research. It would paint the life of man who through hero worship, led Malta from high to low.
It is too big a project and should be left to someone with the stamina and discipline, but it should not stop me from publishing a brief history of Duminku Mintoff in the coming months – a truly subjective account that would paint the Duminku Mintoff as I know him, an unadulterated view that should put an end to the myth that continues to envelop you.
The sales from the book should make up for the Lm2,000 fine.
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