Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/187071
26 Letters maltatoday, SUNDAY, 6 OCTOBER 2013 Send your letters to: The Editor, MaltaToday, MediaToday Ltd. Vjal ir-Rihan, San Gwann SGN 9016 | Fax: (356) 21 385075 E-mail: newsroom@mediatoday.com.mt. Letters to the Editor should be concise. No pen names are accepted. Religion exploited, not exploiter With reference to J. Guillaumier's letter of 8 September, prima facie his reasoning sounds right, but… Every form of communal festa rivalry, wherever that is and whatever cloak it wears, is essentially sectarian in nature. Religion is not the exploiter, it is itself exploited by internal or external regional interests. It is unfortunate that festa celebrations are sometimes riddled with problems. The church is aware of them but cannot wave a magic word. The idolatrous manifestations mainly happen in the streets, for which the church has no jurisdiction. The clapping in front of statues is certainly void and idolatrous and does not induce people to better Christian values. On the contrary it has the opposite effect. The contradic- tions, religious ignorance and limited intellectual range of ordinary lay Catholics are all rampant and worrying. And Guillaumier knows that those are the fanatical, ethnic armchair, museum-piece Christians (only by name). They know where the church parvis is, but they don't know it is 'the house of God and gate of heaven'. They have long abandoned the basic principles of an exemplary life as taught when they were children and adults. The authentic followers of Christ are not found around the statues and only once a year but rather in places like Xaghra, where the parishioners raised €32,000 in aid of the missions in Honduras, or San Gwann, where another €24,000 was raised in aid of a sick child, or during L-Istrina campaign, besides he myriad humanitarian missions carried out by volunteers. Human nature, being what it is, missionary, there is the sudden subtle transformation of the profane into the sacred, when the sacred instantly becomes profane. These people are not aware of the distinction there should be between these two norms and the responsibility they carry. Old habits die hard, and local, tribal tradition takes the upper hand. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Have the various commissions appointed ever tackled the question of hunting or fireworks? The more you oppose these movements, the more aggressive is their reaction… Have you ever heard of someone harnessing or controlling an angry mob? The small weeds are never really eliminated. With all the vast range of insecticides available, mosquitoes, vermin and cockroaches still abound. The reaction sometimes explodes abruptly. Take hunting. Because of the votes, the hunters lobby is strong as ever. Fireworks factories are still being demanded. When the government tried to suppress the festas, instead of three-day celebrations, we now have whole week. After all is said and done, I prefer to call our festas a social occasion and part of our culture. The excesses are simply vain, infantile enthusiasm. Certainly not recommended or encouraged but simply tolerated. Pope Francis's simple reply to the question whether God pardons unbelievers was that the most important matter for them is to obey their conscience when confronted with the decision of choosing between good and evil. I don't think that Mr Guillaumier feels it compellingly dutiful to write derogatory letters, which can do no good, in a vain attempt to ram down our throats his false theories. He has had enough time to flex his muscles in your paper and should lay down his pen, even for prudence's sake. Ultimately, argues Bo Jinn, atheism is not just a pessimistic way of looking at the world, it is a profoundly illogical way. within a few days through private medical facilities, albeit at a hefty price. Weighing their options, the lowincome, sick individual would feel constrained to choose the latter, otherwise waiting too long for further medical treatment, which would mean aggravation of the medical condition or even death. Privately, unless the person was medically insured (unlikely with a low income), he or she would either have to obtain a loan from the bank or beg family and friends to contribute. Another case for consideration is the slowness of our judicial system. Once a Maltese citizen finds himself embroiled in a court case, there is no knowing when he will be out of it. The judicial procedures are so slow that even cases of the Small Case Tribunal, which should be decided in the shortest time possible as per law, are taking more than three years to be settled. Consequently, claimants of some paltry sums or alleged debtors usually end up paying much more than the alleged sum claimed or sum owed. Some sessions of court proceedings barely last a few minutes, and during such times, a ridiculously frivolous excuse is concocted for deferment for another date. Legal fees accumulate, to the detriment of the claimant or the alleged debtor. The excessive delays and irregular procedures have also been criticised by the European commission, but it seems that reforms are also slow to be imple- mented. Whilst we pride ourselves on being a European and civilised country, our institutions are letting us down. They seem to enjoy playing the waiting game with the citizens, because the longer it takes to obtain a governmentprovided health service, paid for by the people's taxes and national insurance contributions, and the longer the delays in our law courts, the greater the benefit for private health services and certain members of the legal profession. Unfortunately, it's the general public, especially the low-income demographic, which has to suffer from this sort of waiting game. John Azzopardi Zabbar The waiting game Excessive waiting to obtain an essential service or to purchase a commodity has usually been attributed to ex-communist countries such as Russia and those of Eastern Europe. Western societies used to deride such situations occurring in eastern countries, whereby their local citizens were regimented in forming long queues and had to wait considerable hours even to buy a loaf of bread. In the Republic of Malta, thank God, Maltese do not have to queue up to purchase the staple foods of life, because our daily bread is sometimes also delivered to our doorsteps. However, like the ex-communist countries, we are still lagging far behind in terms of obtaining an essential health service or during judicial processes. Consider the case of an ailing pensioner, or an unwell worker earning a minimum wage, or of a sick, unemployed individual living on unemployment benefits, who on calling on their doctor is told that their ill health requires further medical investigation or a surgical intervention. The medical practitioner, who may be serving from a government clinic and/ or working part-time in private clinic then advises his patients that they have two options: either to wait several months or years to undergo the required medical treatment free of charge through the government health services or they have the same surgical intervention or medical testing Raymond Sammut Mellieha This scandal calls for an inquiry EDITORIAL – 5 October 2003 A careful look at the contracts of many of the residences in the upmarket St Julian's area better known as 'The Village' would take us back to the original owners of the land. That stretch of land in fact belonged to the Pace family, of BICAL fame. Scouring through the bits of paper of hastily written notes by some of the controllers of the BICAL bank, one easily notes that the land was passed on for a most ridiculous sum to one of Malta's most wellknown entrepreneurs who at the time was more than a simple Mintoffian aficionado. He then resold these lands for a handsome price. This is only one small piece of the vast empire that belonged to the Pace family. Such shocking instances exemplify the treatment of the BICAL assets owned by the Pace family: loans issued by controller Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici from BICAL funds, which were never paid back by the lucky recipients; the controllers' insistence over the years to retain defunct companies and yet demanding that these companies be billed and paid from BICAL funds for audit, administrative and tax consultancies. To just call for an inquiry would not be justice. The BICAL saga is no saga. Indeed it is a scandal. When we take a close look at the Mid-Med Bank scandal that implicated so many politicians, lawyers and businessmen, we can only say that none of the culprits has ever faced judicial proceedings, let alone prison convictions. In the case of BICAL, the two owners, brothers Henry and Cecil Pace, shared no less than 24 years of imprisonment between them. The fact is that the BICAL bank was in Mintoff's sight for reasons completely unrelated to upholding the interests of the depositors. Any attempt by Mintoff to convince us of his altruism will fail from the word 'GO!' Across the world, other angry young socialist prime ministers were busy nationalising private banks in the early 1970s. Not even one post-colonial copycat premier such as Mintoff was in any mood to wait any longer. Soon after he had dealt with BI- CAL, he turned to the National Bank of Malta, a bank which we also plan to look into in these columns. The untimely collapse and demise of one of the NBoM owners – Frank Cassar Torregiani – after Mintoff's decision to nationalise the bank, is still fresh in many people's minds. Mintoff did not only ruin the lives of dozens of people when it came to private banking. He contrived an operational system that was unjust, cruel and vindictive. The long list of suffering individuals who were physically and morally affected by this systematic behaviour is too long to list here, but it is significant enough to consider suggesting that an effigy of Dom is placed side-by-side that Lorry Sant in that morbid Paola square. Mintoff always chose his lieutenants with extra care. They would have to be blind and loyal. And in Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici he found the right man. Here was a man who had no idea what business was about, but who quite efficiently managed to dismantle the Pace empire. In many cases KMB did not even track down payments due from the sale of the assets of the Pace empire. It is not just a shocking, unbelievable and bewildering tale. It is all the more shocking because even the Nationalist Party was a beneficiary when it used the BICAL scandal to pump its campaign machine, only to conveniently forget all these cases and run a mile whenever faced with pleas for some attention. And yet, the Nationalist Party continues to find support from the same people it treats with little or no respect. There has been much pressure on this newspaper to stop the publication of the BICAL scandal. We have chosen to thrust ahead, and we feel we should go a step further. In all fairness, we think we should ask for an inquiry into the background to the trial of the Pace brothers. To call on the government to consider this would be a complete waste of time. The Nationalist government has proven that it has no interest in settling history. Neither do we expect Eddie Fenech Adami to mend fences at such a late stage in his long political career. It therefore falls on the President of the Republic, a symbolic figure but one who is entrusted with safeguarding the constitution, to consider our plea. The BICAL scandal is not a soap opera but an episode that illustrates the extreme cruelty of the Mintoff years. It is proof that in such times, people do not come together to fight evil, but to take full advantage of the demise of others. The number of individuals who inherited a segment of the Pace business empire for free is also too long to list here. With this in mind, this newspaper has taken the initiative to call on the President to call for an inquiry.