Now that ‘Courage’ girl’s on a graft charge, it’s no longer Netflix but Scooby Doo

In 2013, a cheeky electoral ad was aired by the clever chaps down at Labour headquarters.

Labour knew it had the election in the bag, armed by thousands of former PN voters who were ready to make the switch. Driving the message home was this gem of an ad: a middle-class Maltese ‘true blue’ family negotiating the painful catharsis of one daughter going rogue to vote red.

From 2013: Ajma! Jaqq! Istra! and other sounds from the new Labour pépé

Mum was a pearl-clutching proto-Karen; dad was a passive nice-guy reading the FT while the girls bickered; little sister could not understand why the Nationalist hegemony was being upended; and big sister, played by one-time aspiring singer Florinda (Floren) Sultana, had been seduced by the Labour vampire.

Mum and Floren were locked in a face-off: cut-glass English versus Menglish whinery, the old versus the new, the PN versus Labour, corruption versus innocence… so much of that dissembling metaphor for Labour’s friendly socialist brand came crashing down in the last years.

Not only has Labour’s Muscat administration been plagued by allegations and now arraignments for corruption and the ongoing revelations from the assassination of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, but even the bit-players from this ad have been caught up in Malta’s white-collar crime drama.

In what plays out like one of those funny ‘Gomorra’ stories in the Italian press, where the actors turn out to be real mafiosi, this week it was Floren Sultana herself, the ‘Courage To Vote’ actress, who was charged with money laundering.

Everyone keeps saying Malta’s last years are fit for a Netflix script. Now it’s becoming just like Scooby Doo: it’s the one you least expect who’s been responsible all along.

Sultana was caught up in a money laundering investigation that follows on from the legal troubles faced by her stepfather, Darren Debono, the former international footballer caught up in Operation Dirty Oil. Debono faces charges in both Italy and Malta; Sultana is charged together with a former BNF bank official, Albert Buttigieg, of running a series of restaurants associated with Debono - they include Scoglitti, the US-blacklisted Valletta restaurant now named Porticello, and Marsaxlokk’s Capo Mulini, a restaurant once run under the name Gente di Mare by Darren Degabriele, who was killed in a car bomb and was also involved in running fuel shipments from Libya.

The mood on Facebook has been ruthless. Pastizziposting, the go-to group for Maltese memes, sort of broke itself: Floren after Floren of memes displaying the ‘Courage’ ad’s petulant complaint on pocket-fattening by “the Nationalist klilkka” and fears of “five more years of lies under the Nationalists”, each meme outdoing each other, referencing other memes from Pastizziposting.

It’s an enjoyable spectacle, even though the laughs are nothing like the real world where Labour enjoys positive numbers at the polls: Prime Minister Robert Abela, who took over from the disgraced Joseph Muscat, enjoys high trust leads and his party could be looking at a comfortable 26,000 vote lead over the uninspiring Nationalist Party.

It shows how the world of Maltese politics is run by a different set of rules than the one dictated by common decency.