The initiated

The recent stories on Angelo Gafa provide us with a very interesting context to his career and they all make sense with regard to how our country is governed. It is interesting to see how Angelo Gafa can take an unusually large loan for a property. Gafa owns a terraced house in Marsascala with permits in hand to develop it into apartments so presumably, so he owns the assets to collateralize such an amount of debt. Gafa may have other future cash flows planned and that is why the bank would give him a loan of that size, and surely not on his meagre salary.

What is more interesting, however, is the circle of friends that he has built across these last ten years. Gafa’s close friendship with Ivan Calleja of The Convenience Store may not be so unusual, although it gets bizarre when considering that Gafa’s wife, also a police officer, nominated Ivan Calleja as an employer of the year. Quite strange that a police officer would vouch to that extent for an employer whose business model runs on minimum wages. However, the bone of contention seems to be the fact that Ivan Calleja is a business partner with Kevin Deguara, a close associate of Chris Cardona. Deguara is also a company director of Dizz Group, owned by Joseph Muscat’s friend Diane Izzo.

What hasn’t been mentioned, yet is that Angelo Gafa is friends with Bjorn Vassallo, the President of the Malta Football Association and also one of Joseph Muscat’s guys in the Maltese football scene. Muscat plans to replace Bjorn in the next year, and most probably Muscat has promised Bjorn a consolation prize – maybe a long-term job?

One of Joseph Muscat’s ways to win friends and influence people was to introduce them to his circles through his fixers mainly Keith Schembri, just like Rosianne Cutajar was introduced to Yorgen Fenech. Having these people compromised with underhanded deals gave Muscat enough leverage over them to blackmail them. Gafa may have been initiated in circles he doesn’t belong to for this reason. To be precise, Gafa is, however, not being accused of any wrongdoing, but his inaction on corruption puts him under the spotlight.

There is still a lot that we have to learn about the elusive Gafa, but most importantly we need to learn why and how Muscat, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are not in jail, yet.