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I have two clarifications to make, the first one is that what I said about Mr Richard Cachia Caruana (RCC) last week still holds and that what I had to say is just the tip of the iceberg.
The second refers to my late, albeit far too late observations about RCC; I apologise profusely to my readers. I thank them for their encouraging remarks. For those gentlemen who inquired what the ‘illustration ’ in my article was all about, I must emphasise that the illustration had no vulgar connotation, but was simply a black and white image of the eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings.
Though it must be said that if I were publishing my opinion column in a Paris-based satirical newspaper I would have gladly opted for something more Freudian. Although Freud seems to be out of favour, after having been regaled with RCC’s most apologetic reporter’s, Ivan Camilleri’s, picture of the monstrous block in Brussels, I can only think of Freud’s interpretation of biological size versus inferiority complex.
Off we go.
One little uneventful angle to RCC’s chemistry is his understanding of power. To control power one must understand what power is all about. It is about knowing what people want and how they can get. RCC understands this.
There are those who think that this country is led by the Cabinet and the ministers that make it up. It is not, it is led by the inner circle.
In Fenech Adami’s days, the inner circle was Richard, Richard and Richard. Fenech Adami was more his own man before the unfortunate stabbing incident. After that day, RCC was in complete control acting as the Prime minister with an increasingly weaker Eddie Fenech Adami.
He was the go-between for the ministers and all the segments related to power. The former Commissioner of Police and security service chief George Grech was one of his most faithful acolytes and former Attorney General Anthony Borg Barthet another.
Everyone seems to have forgotten the disgraced Chief Justice Noel Arrigo, a relation to RCC. Not to mention the links to certain consultancy firms.
RCC is good at his job and his biggest strength was his ability to open doors for people and to prove that he could close them.
Fenech Adami was not only submissive to RCC, but his prisoner. Despite the rude and aggressive behaviour that RCC metes out to his staff and the constant desertions of ‘his’ employees, Fenech Adami continued to weigh his everyday decision-making on the advice given to him by RCC.
Worst of all, he got entangled in the emotional saga of RCC’s stabbing case and refused to accept that it was clouding his political vision. In January of this year after a verdict that found Meinrad Calleja not guilty, he should have resigned at once. Instead he brushed it aside and went on as if nothing at all had happened. There was no one to give advice, because his advisor was the issue.
When months before the ambitious and tired old man indicated that he would leave, RCC seeing his power base eroding away he argued that the seventy year old man still had it in him to serve as Prime Minister.
RCC’s ambitious nature led people around Fenech Adami to leave. Those of us with a memory will remember that Fenech Adami had John Camilleri as his faithful aide. The man who had rallied behind Fenech Adami in the mid-seventies when he campaigned for leader of the PN, left the Office of the Prime Minister for good after finding it next to impossible to work with Richard.
RCC was instrumental in sanctioning the appointment of directors and chairman in parastatal companies and in the choice of consultants. Because of this, everyone was petrified of the man.
Many owe him a big thank you. Receiving an extra Lm10,000 to Lm15,000 or perhaps more is hardly a bad thing. And somehow it was understood that a person would be more malleable and less difficult to ‘government’ after such generous ‘appointments.’
RCC was always there to remind people of their ‘ingratitude’ when they crossed the line or did something he did not like.
He did this with me when I too was a consultant on ‘bird hunting’ matters.
His income was supplemented by a number of directorships, Air Malta and the infamous Maltapro directorships, companies which co-ordinated the goings on at Malta House in London. And other things too.
Now Godfrey Grima’s buddy RCC has settled for a mega million liri project in Brussels, that will effectively mean taxing the Maltese an additional Lm9 million.
He will be surrounded by an extensive retinue of ‘yes’ men and women, carefully recruited by himself. He has settled for a final solution, encouraging the employment of those members of staff that can give the most in value added…to his project.
Political friends of friends, or rather wives of journalists and so on and so forth.
This little rock with a population of 400,000 which still dumps its untreated urine and faeces in bathing areas has chosen to locate its representative premises bang in Schumann square, next to the commission’s HQ itself. When other larger member States have gone for something less grand, something smaller and less expensive, we the centre of the world have decided to go overboard to please the wishes of this ambitious de facto Prime Minister of Malta.
The block will be designed and refurbished according to the whims of Malta’s permanent envoy, RCC, the man who cannot speak his native language correctly, but negotiated for it to be an official language at the European Commission.
I have seen RCC in action, the way he overshadowed Joe Borg, then minister for foreign affairs and masterly diminished his efficacy as a Foreign minister.
Better still, we have seen RCC and his treatment of Guido De Marco. Now the former Foreign minister just like John Dalli, would not take any ‘hanky panky’ from RCC. And RCC knew it. De Marco had the added advantage of having European matters under his wings.
So just in the same way, John Dalli was discarded from the position of foreign minister, Guido de Marco was kicked upstairs to the isymbolic post of President by Fenech Adami. Of course, encouraged by the whispering of his assistant RCC.
During this tragicomedy, RCC’s pet pit bull terrier was unleashed to decimate the image of Guido in her inimitable spiteful and flippant style in The Malta Independent.
Years before she had done the same to Brigadier Maurice Calleja in The Sunday Times. Years later the former Patrick Spiteri - Malta’s most notorious fraudster - employee was recruited by the new Foreign minister Joe Borg as a media consultant.
The real story about RCC will surely make a riveting bestseller. A jolly good idea and how about it, ‘The unauthorised biography of Richard.’ Out soon.
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