Raphael Vassallo | Sunday, 18 October 2009

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Resign? Tonio? As if...

OK, let’s just get one thing out of the way before I allow myself the luxury of a little rant. I do not think Tonio Fenech should resign as finance minister simply because he accepted an invitation to watch a football match with Joe Gasan and George Fenech.
Nor do I think he should resign for having so abundantly defecated all over Eddie Fenech Adami’s precious ‘Ministerial Code of Ethics’... thus reducing this utterly irrelevant document to little more to a latter-day version of a roll of Tana, complete with smelly brown stains.

No, siree. That he should consider apologising for his silly mistake – as his colleague Louis Deguara suggested, in an uncharacteristic moment of clarity – why, yes, certainly. (Oh wait, I forgot. It’s only Joseph Muscat who has to apologise these days, isn’t it? And even then, for things that took place when he himself was only four years old...)
But no matter. Much as I find it distasteful and disheartening that Tonio Fenech should simply carry on where Old Labour left off – hobnobbing about with businessmen old enough to be his father, and who are obviously more interested in what he can offer them as finance minister than in the pleasure of his company – as far as I am concerned, it would only constitute a resigning matter if it could be proven that Fenech somehow reciprocated the favour, by lavishly bestowing one concession after another (after another, after another, after another, etc.) on the same businessmen who so generously financed his little holiday.

If, on the other hand, the same finance minister is so astonishingly stupid as to put his love of Arsenal ahead of everything else, and undermine public faith in both his and his Prime Minister’s judgement – not to mention dig himself the political equivalent of a mass-grave – well, in that case he shouldn’t resign, so much as remove himself from the gene pool.

Right: time to burst this little zit once and for all, before it starts festering. So fasten your seatbelts, folks, and thank you all for flying Tumas Fenech Airlines.

It goes like this: on Tuesday, Tonio gave an interview to The Times under the headline: ‘I have the Prime Minister’s trust’. (Note: subsequent events suggest that he has only the Prime Minister’s trust... but let’s not nit-pick here). My favourite line in the entire interview was this: “If it were up to me I would ban all forms of gaming because I am a committed Christian and intrinsically believe gambling is wrong.”
In fact, I liked it so much my immediate reaction was to reach for the sick-bag under the seat, and puke up my in-flight breakfast.

Yes folks, introducing the Finance Minister we never knew we had: Tonio the great Christian, the man who would secretly like to ban all forms of gambling to protect us all from vice. And like the God he now claims to serve, Holy Tonio also works in mysterious ways. Very mysterious ways indeed. For let’s face it: what better way to “ban all forms of gambling”, than to turn Malta into the world’s largest online gaming centre, bar none?
For that is precisely what Holy Tonio has done over the past two years. And he did it remarkably well, too. Here is how his efforts were described in Online Casino News (a sinful internet site that I am sure Tonio Fenech is secretly itching to close down):
“Malta seems to be the next contender for supremacy of the online casino industry, with the new ban being put into practice [in other countries] against advertisements for online casinos that do not come from the “white listed” countries. 27 corporations have already announced that their operations would move to the Mediterranean country...” (August 2007)

Hmm. Puts Tonio’s sudden conversion to Christianity into a little perspective, don’t ya think? For you see, in his newfound passion for Christianity, Malta’s finance minister saw nothing wrong with exploiting the fact that the USA had banned online gaming advertising specifically to protect its vulnerable citizens from this selfsame vice. Oh no. Fuelled by his pious devotion to Malta’s one true God – whose name, by the way, is not “Yahweh” but “Mammon” – Tonio Fenech’s government left no stone unturned to ensure that all these ‘sinful’ online betting companies, rejected by the USA and elsewhere precisely because of the social repercussions of unregulated gaming, came to set up shop here instead.
Wait, I haven’t finished. For in true Super-Christian fashion, Holy Tonio now wants to simultaneously bask in the glow of national appreciation for having brought so many millions of euros in investment to Malta... while at the same time posing as some kind of anti-gambling martyr, who is currently being “persecuted” by the evil gaming industry for trying to “ban all forms of gambling”.

Sorry, folks, but I think need that sick bag again...

Anyway. Having read all about Tonio’s anti-gaming crusade, I thought I’d go back to the Gospels this week, and find out what Jesus Christ actually said on the subject of gambling. Well, guess what? I didn’t find a single, solitary reference to gambling anywhere... no, not even when Roman soldiers played dice for his robe.
But Jesus Christ did have a thing or two to say about the more vulnerable sectors of His own society. You know, the poor and the needy.... the lepers and the disabled... and while he may not have specifically referred to ‘single mothers’, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that he would have included them in one of his eight Beatitudes, had the phenomenon been an issue in his day.
However, Tonio Fenech evidently knows more about Christianity than Jesus Christ Himself. So he persecutes single mothers – holding them up to public opprobrium, for all the world as though they were single-handedly responsible for all our country’s economic woes – while at the same moving mountains to accommodate online gaming companies that were deemed too “unregulated” to legally do business in the United States.
Way to go, Tonio: you have single-handedly re-ignited my flagging faith in Christianity.

But back to his interview in The Times, and I quote: “If I knew at the time that we were going to crack down on the gaming parlours I would have been more careful but I had no such indication.”
Huh? What? Quoi? Come again? Sorry Tonio, but I am a little slow on the uptake. Did you just tell us you “had no indication” that your government was about to crack down on gaming parlours... when you yourself – IN YOUR NEXT SENTENCE IN THE SAME INTERVIEW – had submitted a report to Cabinet the previous month outlining your intention to reform the Gaming Laws for precisely that purpose?
For the record, the incriminating sentence is the following: “Even in the previous budgets I made such commitments. The reality is that these regulations have long been coming and Cabinet had rejected them a number of times.”

And yet, incredibly, Tonio Fenech was so very proud of this astonishingly poor interview – which has only deepened existing doubts about his trip with Fenech and Gasan – that for days and days and days on end, all he could chirp in reply to journalists’ questions was that ‘he had nothing to add’ to that same interview. Nothing whatsoever. No, not even some sorely needed punctuation marks.

Well, fair enough, I suppose – after all it is not a crime to fob off a newspaper with a non-answer.
But the House of Representatives? I am sorry, but even I know that that’s another matter altogether. Misleading Parliament, unlike misleading newspapers, is a crime. So what are we to make of the fact that both Tonio Fenech and the Prime Minister used the selfsame interview, complete with the above quotes, as an excuse to avoid answering an MP’s question about the same trip?
By extension, could it not be argued (by people who have ‘hidden agendas’, or who are in the payroll of George Fenech’s rivals, or who are possessed by Satan, or whatever) that Tonio misled Parliament when he said he had ‘nothing to add’ to the same interview?

Sorry, Tonio, but in purely gambling terms – it’s time to call your bluff. Contrary to what you told Kurt Sansone (who to his credit immediately confronted you with the discrepancy) you DID know your government was about to reform the Lotteries and Gaming Bill when you chose to travel with George Fenech and Joe Gasan in April. As Caiaphas put it in the same Gospels you claim to know so well: “Your own words condemn you”.
But then again, I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you.

For you see, Tonio: you will not face any consequences for shattering public faith in the government. Why should you? After all, you still “have the Prime Minister’s trust”. Instead, it will be myself, together with Saviour Balzan, who will have to defend ourselves before a magistrate. And why? Because you sued us for supplying all the missing links in your interview, Tonio: the same links that you tried unsuccessfully to conceal from Parliament.
And you know something, Tonio? I’m grateful to you for it, too. You have confirmed what I have long suspected. After 22 long years of a Nationalist government, the wheel has now come full circle. We are all the back in the days of Old Labour: you know, when Joseph Muscat was four years old, and Eddie’s house was being ransacked; when ministers took holidays with businessmen, and no one batted a eyelid... and above all, when newspapers were there simply to toe the government’s line, or be gutted. Take care, and see you soon in court.

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