How voters elect serial fabricators

We half expect politicians to lie but we don’t expect them to lie about everything. We don’t expect them to invent their entire lives.

“How did New Yorkers vote for a serial fabricator like Geoge Santos? They didn’t know he was lying. His deception was only exposed after the election. The constituents bear no blame – his party does.”

Maybe we should. Because George Santos, a newly elected US Congressman, did just that.

He claimed he held degrees from Baruch college and New York University. He never attended any university. He claimed he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sach. Neither company had any record of ever employing him. He stated he was a financier with 14 years’ experience. He was a customer service agent. He bragged he owned 13 properties but lived with his sister in rented accommodation and was evicted repeatedly. He tweeted “9/11 claimed my mother’s life” but she died in 2016 and was nowhere near the Twin towers on 9/11. He claimed he lost four employees in a deadly 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando. But none of the 49 killed were linked to companies at which Santos worked. When challenged he replied they weren’t actual employees but potential employees.

He claimed he was a “proud American Jew” and that his grandparents escaped Jewish persecution in Ukraine and fled the holocaust through Belgium. Both his grandparents were born in Brazil. And he was Catholic.

Now it turns out that although he declared no criminal past, Brazil reactivated charges against him for stealing a cheque book from his mother’s employer and using it to fraudulently pay hundreds of dollars in purchases. Those charges were suspended after Brazilian authorities couldn’t locate him. Now that his location is known Brazil is after him. Santos borrowed 5,000 dollars from a friend but stopped answering his friend’s messages and failed to repay the money. A judge ordered Santos to repay the 5,000 dollars. He never did.

Journalists chased him for weeks for comments, answers and clarifications. Santos failed to reply. Eventually he turned up on politically friendly TV stations to admit he’d “embellished his resume’”. But maintained his lies were not as bad as those of his political opponents, the Democrats.

Behind his remarkable electoral victory and lies, lurk more sinister concerns. Where did Santos get the hundreds of thousands of dollars for his campaign? According to his financial statement his own company Devolder paid him an annual salary of 750,000 dollars and dividends of between 1 million and 5 million, but claimed the company has no clients. Nobody really knows what his company does. It has no website and failed to file annual reports. Santos also received 30,000 dollars from Andrew Intrater, the cousin of Russian oligarch Vicktor Vekoberg, a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

How did New Yorkers vote for a serial fabricator like Geoge Santos? They didn’t know he was lying. His deception was only exposed after the election. The constituents bear no blame - his party does.

The Republican Party bears responsibility for either not knowing, not trying to know, or pretending not to know about their candidate. Now that he’s elected and his falsehoods exposed, the Republicans won’t kick him out. Their majority is too small to challenge one of the few Congressmen who gave them their slim majority. And their own leader, Donald Trump, lied so profusely, Santos looks like an amateur.

Santos’ story reveals the depressingly base level to which Republicans brought democracy. They have normalised outrageously atrocious behaviour. They have shown that not only are there no consequences for lying and cheating, but there are huge rewards for those who dupe their fellow countrymen. Serial fabricators succeed. They’ve extinguished the shining light of justice based on the principle that success and respect are earned through honest hard work.

Santos’ dispiriting tale wouldn’t be half as bleak if we didn’t live it every day in our country. The man condemned by the court for having submitted statements that were “not credible” after coercing a mentally ill man into selling him his heirloom for a pittance, was promoted to Foreign Affairs Minister. Ian Borg personally awarded 20 different direct orders worth over 500,000 euro to TEC Ltd for tents and other facilities for the Metro launch. TEC Ltd then provided Borg with tents for at least six massive electoral campaign events in different locations, including Dingli, Mgarr, Siggiewi, Rabat, Qormi, and Zebbug. Borg also held other major activities including two coffee mornings at Villa Arrigo. Borg claimed he spent just 33,000 euro on his campaign, but refused to answer questions about his links to TEC Ltd or to provide receipts or a breakdown of his campaign expenses.

Rosianne Cutajar claimed tens of thousands of euro she was paid from a property purchase agreement involving Yorgen Fenech were not for her. She failed to declare the 9,000 euro gift she received from Fenech before defending 17-Black at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. When that Assembly initiated disciplinary procedures against her, Robert Abela shielded her from punishment by replacing her. He saved her skin by letting “the voters decide” when he allowed her to run on the party ticket.

Like the US Republican party, instead of public servants Labour enlists reprobates. It allows crooks to evade accountability. The responsibility for that lies with its leader. He is the role model for evasion, obfuscation and deflection.

Abela himself hid his income in his asset declaration, referring to an inaccessible tax return. He hid his luxury yacht. His explanations about how he rented a derelict property, he bought for peanuts, to non-resident Russians don’t convince. His excuses for his dodgy deal with Chris Borg on that small Zabbar plot stink. His underhand tactics ramming through his choice of Standards Commissioner with his anti-deadlock mechanism, his false claims of having consulted widely on the media law, his failure to publish the Miriam Pace report for months despite promising otherwise, his refusal to implement the Caruana Galizia inquiry recommendations are mere clues to Abela’s untrustworthiness.

“These are blatant lies which call into question how your constituents can believe anything you will say while representing them”, George Santos was told.