From what we can make out, not very much longer than two years ago, the owners of the Cafe’ Premier outfit were in contact with Premier-to-be Joseph Muscat’s outfit, if not with the Premier-to-be himself, and castles in the air were being built about the paltry sum of €4,200,000 being - for some obscure reason - made available to the owners when Premier-to-be Joseph Muscat would become Premier-that-is Joseph Muscat.
It has been denied by Premier Muscat that he was in on any deal and, in fact, the dear chap is seeking to ram it down the gullets of the gullible that the eventual deal is proof positive that his government will work with anyone. This is because these guys are Nationalists, as evidenced by the fact that they gave the munificent sum of €1,000 (that’s three noughts) to the party and an equally magnificent amount (again, three noughts) to a PN candidate.
All I can say to that, Premier Muscat, is “smell the coffee”.
Speaking for myself, I choose to believe the country’s Prime Minister when he says that he did not make any sordid pre-election deals with any bloated plutocrat and especially not the owners of the Cafe’ Premier. That said, I trust Premier Muscat will forgive me if I point out that this is not an easy one for everyone to swallow, given the sequence of events.
This coffee is getting smellier and smellier by the minute
No sooner had soon-to-be Premier Muscat scuttled into the Palace to take the oath of office and then scooted off to toddle up the steps to Castille as actual Premier Muscat, the ink hardly dry on the papers he had signed on swearing to serve the country and obey the Constitution, than he was banging off e-mails from his gmail (and not his gov.mt) address ensuring that the Cafe’ Premier guys had enough of your and my money made available to them to pay off the taxman, the VAT man, the bread man and plenty of others, except, for some strange reason, the vegetable man.
It’s funny, but one of the things that really irritates me is that €3,500 of the €4,200,000 were paid over in order for the bread supplier to be satisfied, this being symptomatic of the sheer greed of the players involved, who didn’t feel able to dip their hands into their own pocket even for this paltry sum.
Incidentally, Hillary Clinton, bless her, is looking at having her presidential prospects harmed for using her private e-mail address but Premier Muscat doesn’t seem to have these troubles.
Nor does he appear to be troubled by the stench of pretty rancid coffee that those who choose not to believe his version of events are smelling.
Can you blame anyone for smelling anything but the scent of roses wafting up in this farce? Days - if not hours, let’s not exaggerate - after being elected to power after so many years in the wilderness and what does Premier Muscat’s top brass do, clearly with his approval? They hand over €4,200,000 to the directors of - let’s not beat about the bush - a bankrupt operation.
Not only that, we’re also invited to accept at face value the excuse that this was an intrepid rescue operation: not of the owners of the company, that was an incidental benefit, but of the National Library because, we were told, there was a clear and present danger that the gas cylinders used for cooking would blow up and take our national heritage with them.
Except that there were no gas cylinders.
While on the subject of face value, Premier Muscat is ecstatic that his purchase of the Cafe’ Premier has been endorsed by the National Audit Office as being at a fair market price. The thing is, it’s not entirely clear what one means by “fair market price”.
Is this the price of the property paid, not taking into account the commission, the notary’s fees, the lawyer’s fees, stamp duty and capital gains tax, all of which seem to have been paid by us?
Or is it the total price of all of these assorted cherries in Premier Muscat’s little pie, also paid by us?
Does it include the value of the VAT amnesty taken up by the owners just after they concluded their deal with Premier Muscat’s government?
And while on the subject of “fair market price”, was this worked out by taking into account what a property like that is worth freehold on the market? Or is €4,200,000 the price an owner would pay to a defaulting tenant who is being sued for eviction and whose case would already be something in the region of three years old today?
This coffee is getting smellier and smellier by the minute but, luckily, I have Premier Muscat’s word for it that the deal was kosher and above board. It’s not as if some horrid little scheme was hatched up to buy oil from Azerbaijan, just to conjure up some random happenstance, after all.
Not wanting to be outdone by Premier Muscat, Minister Joseph Mizzi belittled the stench of rotting coffee that was wafting from the general area of the Cafe’ Premier by levelling serious charges against Opposition leader Simon Busuttil.
As at the time of writing this, Mizzi hadn’t seen his way open to repeating these charges outside of the protective environment of the House, which is probably lucky for him, because he might have had to perceive something other than a traffic jam.
This is because what Mizzi was relying on to dirty Busuttil was and remains nothing to be ashamed of at all, except if you believe everything that Labour spews out as if it was written on stone tablets carried by a descendant of Moses.
The settlement about which perceptive Mizzi was spluttering was reached after nine (yes, nine) years in court, during which the company that had been snookered by Enemalta had won its case before the Malta Resources Authority appeals board, the Court of Appeal, the Competition Office and the European Commission, all of which august institutions had slammed Enemalta for its behaviour.
It was after this series of decisions that a damages claim of more than three times the amount settled on was started and Busuttil wasn’t even involved in this aspect of the case.
But, according to Mizzi, settling what, from where I’m sitting, looked like being pretty much a foregone conclusion, but without the shadowy toing and froing that the Cafe’ Premier guys had resorted to with Premier Muscat’s government, is the same as coming to an ‘agreement’ to shovel over four million two hundred thousand of your and my euros in order to ‘settle’ a case that was clearly going to be decided in favour of the people paying over the money (Premier Muscat’s government) rather than against it, as was the case referred to by Mizzi.
This legal genius, from what I can see, seems to think that paying money to settle a case you’re going to win is all fine and dandy, on the same lines as paying money to settle a case you were clearly going to lose and after losing have to pay a heck of a larger amount.
No wonder Mizzi won’t say it outside the House of Representatives.
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