Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/17/daphne-caruana-galizia.html
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I guess if you don’t think you can win in court, that’s one option.
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Anybody willing to admit they live in a plutocratic oligarchy yet?
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Damnit!
In a perfect world, that would sow the dragon’s teeth, causing an army of investigators to spring up and continue the job, but we live in the World of Insufficient Light.
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that is the literal difference separating ‘lawful’ companies and criminal organizations.
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Do the Maltese use car bombs to eliminate political rivals? Do people in the UK shoot MPs? It seems someone does not care what lines they cross any longer.
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Trial in the court of public assassination.
I don’t understand the world, and not just in a big way such as why people prefer lies and liars (religions, politics) over truth, but also in small ways. Why send someone death threats if you want someone dead? Wouldn’t that make the job (of getting an opportunity) harder?
Bert
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Hmmm. I would think that in Malta, like most developing countries, all the voters know the PM is corrupt and they don’t care, because they also know all the other politicians are equally corrupt.
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Malta is like, this close to Sicily. Literally.
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You send someone death threats to get them to stop doing something. Then if they don’t stop, you kill them.
Also death threats lack credibility if they’re never actually carried out.
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And the world lets out a collective ‘meh’ with the full knowledge that the people responsible are never going to pay for their crimes and with the suspicion that it’s likely the cops will find a suspect who will die in a shootout with the police ensuring they will never brought to trial where they might name the people who hired them.
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Crack fingers So, the remaining 99% can choose that option too if they cant win in court against the % that are corrupted withing the 1%?
sigh If only, like the rest of us petty people, evil had champions like we had one in Daphne Caruana Galizia it would be way easier to sort them out 
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I don’t know, but Russian oligarchs (and other billionaires) do seem to favor use of Malta as a Ruble Laundromat, and I imagine they could get someone to blow up someone else. And, I wouldn’t call Daphne Caruana Galizia a “political rival”; she was not seeking office, but just the truth re PM Muscat and his alleged corruption.
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Cyprus and not Malta is the Russians’ big money laundry. Malta’s banks seem to be comparatively small-time laundries mainly serving corrupt rich scumbags from Central Asia, aided by corrupt scumbags in the local government.
The confusion is understandable, given that the oligarchs in this case are based in former republics in the Soviet empire and are just as if not more thuggish and brutal than their Russian counterparts and given that we’re talking about small Mediterranean island nations whose governments tolerate the laundry operations.
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There is Russian billionaire $$$$$ in Malta.
Please to be googling!
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I did check it out. Galizia’s own articles discuss how Malta is not a big focus for Putin and his pet oligarchs when it comes to laundering, to the point where the Shirtless Wonder can’t be bothered to meddle in their local politics. For what laundering that Russians do in Malta, it seems that leaving a neoliberal globalist like Muscat in place does the job on its own.
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This really chilled me when I heard it this morning.
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Yeah, this is a real “Fuck Today” cross-post.
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… but that’s where the intrepid and determined – and now dead – Galizia happened to be based. And financial/government corruption (almost necessarily hand-in-hand) can lead everywhere, and between those with similar interests within a country. This murder of a “political rival” was too obvious; I don’t think Muscat would have lent a hand in this unless the act was done by others with (tenuously) connected/similar interests, with that buying Muscat deniability.
And, frankly, where $$$$$ is concerned, I don’t see why 3 oligarchs laundering in Malta would be less likely to protect themselves than 30 in Cyprus.
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