Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is fixated with the idea that the Maltese economy can boom only if we rope in foreign investment. Of course, he is quite right: a small country like Malta, with restricted human and natural resources, does need direct foreign investment.

The problem with Muscat is that, as long as work is created, he does not bother about the quality of the work and the rapid undercutting of salaries. Take the Italiani a Malta website for example. It would seem that loads of Italians are flocking to Malta to take up jobs at a leading foreign-owned factory in Malta, at €800 a month.

Everything is legal, everything is above board, with a salary slightly higher than the minimum wage. So unemployed foreigners flock to Malta. But how does this reflect on the locals? 

Well, I assure you that even if they owned their own house, a couple earning €800 a month will barely survive till the end of month. And with children, forget it.

But for Muscat, this is not a problem. His self-declared mission is creating jobs and that’s it. That you do not survive on the salaries given for these jobs is absolutely of no concern to him.

His attitude towards rich foreigners is even more worrying. Muscat lays down a red carpet for them to invest in Malta. The problem is that he surrounds himself with the shadiest of characters, who might have had brushes with the law in the past or present, and heaps them with giveaways... at the expense of the Maltese taxpayer and of our country’s reputation.  Some examples.

In 2013, the Anglo-Indian Shiv Nair was engaged by the Maltese government as a consultant on energy issues. Daphne Caruana Galizia later outed this person and revealed that Joseph’s Shiv had been permanently blacklisted by the World Bank in 2000 because corrupt practices formed part of his modus operandi. 

Blinded by his admiration for rich, shady characters, Muscat did not even bother with a Google search on Shiv, let alone a proper due diligence exercise. Instead, he sent this London fraudster together with Konrad Mizzi, who had just opened his secret Panama company, on an official government delegation to Qatar.

Muscat foreigner number two: on May 1, 2015, it was a real pleasure for myself, Carmel Cacopardo and Ralph Cassar to reveal that Muscat had secretly agreed to give away our ODZ virgin land in Żonqor to a certain Jordanian, Sadeen. We were defined as the three stooges by Joseph’s lackeys at the time.

Who is Sadeen? This is the usual billionaire contractor who made a fortune for himself in Saudi and goes by the name of Hani Salah.  But again Muscat, in his blind love-admiration for the rich ones, forgot to consult Wikipedia.

Others did not forget, and we found out that our Żonqor man had in the past been condemned to five years suspended sentence imprisonment by the Saudi authorities for irregularities in his works.

Joseph Muscat’s self-declared mission is creating jobs and that’s it. That you do not survive on the salaries given for these jobs is absolutely of no concern to him

Today, the Maltese owe it to the ‘three stooges’ for having exposed how Muscat and his cronies had agreed behind the people’s backs to give away for peanuts a huge chunk of our public land.

A third dirty Muscat aficionado is the notorious Ram Tumuluri, of Vitals fame. This is the man to whom Mizzi gave away the St Luke’s, Karen Grech and Gozo hospitals for a song.

He must be very powerful if Health Minister Chris Fearne could not distance himself from Mizzi’s deal.

Yet Tumuluri’s misdeeds, again revealed by Daphne, were there for all to see. He was considered a fraud in Canada, stole $400,000 from a hotel in British Columbia and so on and so forth.

Muscat’s fourth ‘net worth talented’ crook is the by now the world famous Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, of Pilatus fame. Our Burmarrad boy was too blinded by the glamour to notice that this guy was flouting the economic sanctions imposed by the US and the EU – ergo Malta – on Iran as from 2010.

His fleeing from Pilatus Bank in the dead of night with two suitcases, which Edward Zammit Lewis assures us were only full of dirty underwear and lingerie, still did not bring our Joseph to his senses.

It was only the arrest in the US of this Johnnie-come-lately St Kitts Nevis citizen which might (but I am not sure) have rocked Muscat out of his perennial state of adulation for rich foreigners.

The fifth guy is the Libyan millionaire Hosni Bey, who, in 2011, had all company accounts and licences frozen due to partnerships with the Gaddafi regime and serious accusations of corruption. I am told that this Hosni is the owner of a trendy restaurant in Valletta.

Whatever, exactly three years ago, in April 2015, this bluffer had the nerve to lay the Metropolis foundation stone in Testaferrata Street. Together with the other bluffer who accompanied him, Muscat, he declared that the whole Metropolis would be built by this year, 2018.

In reality, the people of Gżira were landed with stagnant water in a glorified hole and thousands of mosquitos to be bitten by.

These are just a few samples.  

Will Muscat’s admiration for rich shady foreigners continue unperturbed?

Arnold Cassola is former Alternattiva Demokratika chairman and former secretary general of the European Green Party.

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