Factory of lies

What’s happened to PN MP Karol Aquilina over the past year ought to frighten each and every one of us. It’s the kind of thing we read of happening in Russia, in Azerbaijan or Turkey. Police and government stooges fabricating evidence to lay false charges at the feet of Opposition MPs in the type of nightmare usually faced by politicians in totalitarian dictatorships.

Karol Aquilina is soft-spoken but lethal to the crooks and murderers that have been squatting in Castille for the past eight years. He’s been at the forefront of the battle against the corruption and criminality of the PL government in office since 2013, a veritable thorn in the side of the villains in the Labour Party.

That explains, of course, why they and their sidekicks resorted in desperation to concocting an absurd lie about him, in order to try to bring him down. In clear machination with one or more police officers, Labour’s pet hyena fabricated a story about Aquilina’s dangerous driving, somehow got hold of a video that was doctored, by him or by the policemen who gave it to him, in an attempt to frame Aquilina.

The state of Malta’s police force, in itself, is enough to make anyone despair. As one scandal after another involving members of the force emerges, the only conclusion to be drawn is that far too many of them couldn’t be trusted to police a bucket of worms, let alone the population of an entire country.

But there’s little that compares with the base iniquity and shamefulness of Karl Stagno Navarra’s behaviour. The sheer degeneracy of it truly beggars belief.

In May of last year, Stagno Navarra reported on his One TV show that Aquilina had been driving dangerously, refusing to move aside for a diplomatic vehicle and running a red light, in an incident alleged to have taken place in 2019. The former NET News reporter, who washed up on the Labour Party TV station after working at Malta Today, demanded that the police commissioner take action against Aquilina.

The police, astonishingly, complied. Never mind that they’ve failed to take action against real criminals such as shamed former prime minister Joseph Muscat, disgraced former ministers Konrad Mizzi and Chris Cardona, and so many others implicated in some of the most serious crimes on the books.

No matter that accused financial criminal and former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri has been cited multiple times by assassins and accused assassins of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia as having been a lynchpin of the plot to kill her, and yet he has not, so far, been charged with that most serious crime of all.

No. Miscreant PL ministers and their sidekicks are allowed to scuttle freely about the island despite their clear involvement in serious crimes, but Karol Aquilina, on the basis of a doctored video that landed on the lap of one of Muscat’s most vicious attack dogs, was charged almost immediately.

Of course, the fact that Stagno Navarra was able to get hold of and broadcast the video he said proved Aquilina’s crimes, which has turned out to be doctored footage anyway, illustrates just how desperate the situation within the police force is. A country that can’t trust its law enforcement officers is essentially in a state of emergency.

Fortunately, despite political appointments having diluted the confidence of the public in the judiciary, some judges and magistrates can still be counted on, making them perhaps the country’s last defence against the total annihilation of Malta’s battered democracy.

This week, Aquilina was cleared in court of all charges against him. The PN has now called for an investigation into how Stagno Navarra got hold of the video and how it was manipulated to “carry out a character assassination” of the PN MP.

There are many in Malta who need to learn the hard truth about the wickedness of making up malicious lies about others.

To be clear, this malevolent gossiping, lying about others to protect oneself or one’s “hero,” is not a sin only Stagno Navarra or the PL indulges in. In supposedly Catholic Malta, there are many across all political divides and social groups who’ve been guilty of attempting to discredit others through spreading lies about them.

The reality, of course, is that people who do spread lies about others always do so knowingly, and with an ulterior motive. In this case, the evil intent is so glaringly obvious, it’s astonishing that the perpetrators decided to go ahead anyway.

The Malta Labour Party is utterly toxic. There’s no other way to describe this former political party turned den of liars and thieves. And apart from their own, home-grown crooks, it acts like a magnet to any dishonest, ill-intentioned people.

Rejects and discards from other Parties gravitate towards it, knowing they’ll always find a niche within the PL. People like Stagno Navarra, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, Ian Castaldi Paris, Robert Musumeci… the worst elements of the PN all seem to find themselves embraced by the PL at some point.

A turncoat is, by definition, a traitor. One who abandons his/her cause in order to join the opposing side for personal gain. A turncoat is someone who betrays his/her own principles and values in order to benefit in some way.

Someone who leaves a political party in disgust at the corruption or criminality it’s allowing to run rampant, or because it abandons the ideology or morality that it’s supposed to uphold, isn’t a turncoat. Marlene Farrugia and Godfrey Farrugia, who left the PL in horror at what disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s government had become, are not turncoats. They’re heroes.

Stagno Navarra and the rest of his sorry clan are, however, turncoats. Their departures were not dictated by conscience, but self-interest. The reasons Stagno Navarra fell out with the PN are well documented, nowhere more unambiguously than on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog. The PL’s willingness to take him in, despite knowing how many dark shadows hung over his head, is just further evidence of its essential malevolence.

It really has come to the point where, if there’s a single honest person left, either within the Party structures or among its supporters, they need to stand up and leave, now.

Stagno Navarra’s attempt to use lies and fabrication is only one in a long list of attempted frame-ups against Opposition politicians, including David Casa, Simon Busuttil and, of course, Giovanna Debono.

Stagno Navarra’s abject shame is what anyone who indulges in this type of character assassination should see every time they look in the mirror. In one way or another, the truth does always win in the end.

Featured photo shows Karl Stagno Navarra during his TV programme on the Labour Party’s station.