Disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat is providing ‘consultancy’ on the breeding of exotic birds and organic produce. And for his expertise in bird excrement, Muscat is receiving €141,600 a year.
Or at least that’s what he’d like you to believe.
Within three months of being kicked out of Castille, Muscat started receiving over €10,000 per month from Organicum Ltd. But the company was not a thriving enterprise making millions. It was losing hundreds of thousands of euros.
In 2020, the year in which Muscat was recruited, Organicum lost €153,964. Muscat’s consultancy services were so effective that, one year later, Organicum’s losses increased by 24% to €190,741.
Only idiots and fools would believe Muscat when he claims he’s paid €140,000 a year to provide consultancy to an exotic bird company when that company is practically bankrupt.
Where is the business sense in recruiting somebody who knows nothing about macaws, toco toucans and palm cockatoos and paying him tens of thousands of euros per month? Especially when the company is drowning in losses.
And especially when Muscat was so busy with so many other consultancies – Accutor AG, SpringX Media, Fortina, Stivala.
Muscat isn’t providing consultancy on exotic birds. Everybody knows that. He knows it more than anybody else – which explains his increasingly hysterical defence.
Organicum Ltd belongs to Johann Schembri, the co-owner of the Dragonara Casino. Muscat extended the casino’s lease by 64 years and reduced its fees from €1.2 million to just €500,000 annually. Alfred Degiorgio, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murderer, gambled €570,000 alone in casinos.
That gives some idea of how cheaply Muscat gave our land away to Johann Schembri. Even ex-Labour MP Rosianne Cutajar described Muscat’s Dragonara deal as “disgraceful” and estimated that Muscat saved Schembri and his co-owner €13 million.
Schembri had a huge obligation towards the Kink. Sure enough, within months of Muscat’s generosity, Schembri started paying Muscat over €10,000 per month.
There’s no conclusive evidence, no proof of corruption Muscat insists. His bleating sheep repeat his hollow excuses. How things change.
At a press conference on 13 May 2010, the then-leader of the opposition Joseph Muscat firmly denounced the BWSC scandal.
“What we’ve heard is that since there was no ‘conclusive evidence’ of corruption, nothing happens. This is the typical attitude of those who are not interested in fighting corruption,” Muscat shouted.
“We must speak up and not close our eyes”, Muscat incited. “We’re not going to let this happen in our country – the truth is that whoever does not fight corruption is corrupt.”
“Today, there are some who warn me not to speak about corruption,” Muscat had declared.
“Why are we speaking about political corruption? Because we are jealous of the corrupt? Because we’ve been out of power for so long that we don’t get a bite of the cake? We speak against corruption because corruption destroys the economy, raises prices and reduces opportunities. Corruption steals from the poor, the middle classes and even the rich who are honest, who work and pay taxes so that those who want to get rich quick benefit”.
Muscat version 2010 was right.
“Corruption is a tax that you and your family pay for – with your health and your money,” Muscat insisted. “Corruption is a weight around the neck of hardworking, honest families.
“With a stroke of the pen, they (the corrupt) earn what many Maltese and Gozitans would need to work 300 years to earn,” Muscat noted.
How prophetic.
With his own stroke of the pen, Muscat signed that Dragonara deal and soon started pocketing hundreds of thousands of euros. With his stroke of the pen, Muscat gave away half of our health service to a gang of crooks and soon after started pocketing tens of thousands of euros per month.
For years, Muscat denounced the Nationalist Party for failing to notice that an Enemalta procurement committee member was allegedly receiving kickbacks.
On 20 January 2013, Muscat bellowed, “I challenge [prime minister Lawrence] Gonzi to say whether he or his advisors knew at any point of this corruption.”
That committee member, Dr Frank Sammut, has still not been convicted of any crime after 10 years of Labour. Yet Muscat was crying foul and accusing Gonzi of corruption.
At that meeting, Muscat’s warm-up act was young lawyer Robert Abela.
“The Labour Party has acknowledged and paid for its past mistakes and is committed never to repeat them,” Abela promised.
And here we are. Those mistakes are multiplying so fast that nobody can keep up.
Just days later Muscat was again declaiming PN’s corruption. On 28 January 2013 Muscat accused the Nationalist Party of not having the “political will to tackle corruption”.
But he, Joseph Muscat, Mr Clean himself would sort the country out.
He promised the PL would “give the people what they deserve”.
He promised to implement 15 measures to rid the country of corruption. Among them he promised that the “PL will strengthen the Auditor General’s office to give it more power to investigate those who refuse to collaborate with his office”. Did he have Konrad Mizzi in mind? Was he thinking of Keith Schembri? Or maybe his sidekick Kurt Farrugia?
“Whistleblowers,” he promised, “will be encouraged to bring their concerns forward.”
But when Philip Rizzo went to him with a bulky dossier on Evarist Bartolo’s shady canvasser, Muscat tried to silence him and attempted to bribe him with a better job.
“The PL will introduce transparency and improve procedures for awarding government contracts and follow the Auditor General’s recommendations,” he said.
And that “The Freedom of Information Act will be fully implemented for the sake of government transparency”.
“Permanent secretaries and chairpersons of government entities will be held personally responsible should files and documents required by investigators go missing”.
“A Labour government will become party to legal proceedings to get politicians who enriched themselves to pay back what they had taken”.
Joseph Muscat version 2023 better start saving up.
“We are living in a country where no politician ever carried any responsibility for, let alone was convicted of corruption,” Muscat lamented in 2010.
Well, his prayers may yet be answered.
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halliel, giddieb, korrott ad infinitum. shame on the supposedly socialist leader who turned out to be the MOST CORRUPT xpm Malta ever had together with his puppet bob who self confessed continuity. And how on earth can the consultant of the most corrupt pm be honest himself?
You have the illicit money stolen from the honest Maltese taxpayers but you lost ALL your dignity – the sad thing is that ALL Maltese had lost theirs thanks you corrupt lot.
Taf fuq min qed titkellem Kevin, Il korrott u gidieb tas seklu. Jien il biza tieghe hu li kollox ser jibqa l istess u dal gidieb u korrot jibqa imaxtar u igawdi u nahseb li mhux sejjer zbaljat
Nahseb il KINK qed jitla min BUMARRAD ghal wardija u jaliflu u innaddaflu il BIRDIES lic CINCOLIN hux hekk ZEPP????
“Only idiots and fools would believe Muscat!” – Sadly (for us) there are so many of them in this land of milk & honey!
It is well known that Joseph Muscat, just like his followers who always see nothing wrong in all he did and is still doing, has a ‘selective memory’, a capability of ‘proper amnesia’ when it suits him in time and on the matter concerned. Surely, the Joseph Muscat of 2010 must have been lost in the duration of his career which come to a close in January 2020. But maybe, this Joseph Muscat was just a ‘make believe’ projection that had to do its work for party interests.
This man really has fooled them all, he is still successful in this because his admirers always either look the other way or ignore anything that is revealed and therefore comes close to the truth.
In hindsight, I doubt that he was always ‘Mr Clean’, merely pretending to be just that sort of character. His speeches from the past appear today as merely having been a ruse in order to gain votes from the non-PLers of the day back then. It also looks that once in power, the never ending partying of the PLers started full scale and they are so much drunk with it to the hilt that they cannot stop it and in the end, are to collaps on their own greed.
History will judge him hard, because history is impartial and although it is undisputed that he already has his place in history, this place is tainted. It is tainted by his tacit approval of dehumanising Daphne Caruana Galizia, letting the trolls loose on her like Mintoff was tacitly approving when the MLP thugs were all over the place.
These two characters, as different as they are, and as egomanic as they both are each one in his own ways, are displaying the very dark and despicable side of the Maltese mentality. The double standards and the double thinking, the lying, the cheating, the crookery in its variety of shades, sometimes in the shadows, often unashamed in the open.
The irony of this comparison of his speeches from 2010 and the result of his politics in a time period of merely 13 years since then, the way Malta looks today, are such a stark contrast in the negative that it is topping everything that was before. This is all pure evidence to me that when a PLer says that he or she ‘loves Malta’ in the sense as they always say ‘Malta first and foremost’, to always repeat the old Mintoff phrasing, in truth it means the opposite. They really know how to make the people and the country suffer and it hasn’t ended yet.
No matter how the names of the companies, as mentioned in this article sound, the fact that at the end of the ‘circle’ of business, there is always a Maltese PLer or ex-PLer, gives one the ‘glimps’ of the ‘rules of Casino Maltese’. One might as well say that this is the PL’s way of doing ‘economy for insiders only’. Allegedly sinister people doing sinister business and cashing in huge amounts of money.
Joseph Muscat, as high as he made it to the top, as deep he has fallen and his party is taking Malta down with himself and his cronies. The man who fooled them all ends up being the fool himself. Pity for Malta because it didn’t deserve to be treated that way.
One correcting remark to my previous comment regarding the Maltese mentality. All those negative characteristics mentioned, are in fact human and wherever one looks, beyond Malta, one can find the same people to whom all these apply for they are just the same.
This is relativating my previous remark, but it doesn’t changes the fact that the destruction of Malta goes fairly and squarly on the account of the PL and as much as they are trying to deny it, deflect from it, mislead people by their propaganda and the help of their trolls, it doesn’t alter it because the evidence is too obvious to see. That is what goes around in Malta and the mentality that applies to it is personal greed and not stereotypes attached to a nation, but certainly to the PL.