What a mess

When I started giving my column a more current angle a few years ago, I sometimes thought I would eventually run out of things to write about. When you have to deliver something once a week, rain or shine, you sometimes wonder if you have something worth sharing from one week to the next.

Unfortunately, it turns out I couldn’t have picked a better moment in Malta’s history to make my transition into one of the country’s minor, screaming John the Baptists (I know the roar in the desert for a group of disobedient, disinterested people; all I need is a beard).

Although I’ve always found something to whine about, I wondered if it was just my perception or if I’d just become some kind of truffle pig for scandals. As usual, it turned out to have nothing to do with perception.

When the owners of the Instagram page ‘Limestone Jungle’ asked internet tool ChatGPT about the frequency of scandals in Malta, the artificial intelligence’s response was: “It’s hard to point to a specific week in Malta where there hasn’t been some kind of scandal, especially in recent years.”

The beauty of the Internet is that even though our feeble human minds can’t always keep up, forget information, or become desensitized, the Web is forever.

Just last week, lawyer Jason Azzopardi said he had filed a petition in court alleging that LESA officials were passing on traffic fines to unsuspecting tourists. According to Azzopardi, this multi-million dollar fraud involved fraudulently charging penalty points accrued by Maltese drivers to tourists’ rental cars, without the tourists’ knowledge.

This follows the ongoing Identità debacle, which was also brought to court by Azzopardi, who claims that 18,000 cards were issued on the basis of forged documents.

It is hard not to think of the mafia octopus metaphor when such allegations are brought to the attention of the court.