Is there still Rule of Law in Gibraltar? Is there corruption in the local police?
Are employees' Human Rights protected? Is there a mafia in Gibraltar?
How corrupt are the Courts in Gibraltar? Is Entain a bad employer?
- Home page
- My witness statement for the courts
- Evidence supporting my witness statement
- Failure of the first Tribunal Chairman
- Sabotage of the Tribunal transcript
- The evidence in the Tribunal transcript
- Press articles about Tribunal failings
- Corruption articles in the international press
- Entain / GVC
- Hassans law firm
- The Disciplinary Committee and LSRA
- Gibraltar Police
Before he was elected into Parliament on 8 December 2011, Mr Picardo was a lawyer at the Hassans law firm.
In that time, my personal interest in Gibraltar's politics was close to zero. There are no real party ideological differences in Gibraltar, so local politics is quite boring. If it weren't for Mr Picardo's unreasonable meddling in my personal affairs, I would today even have been less interested than ever before in local politics. But this is where the problem lies: Mr Picardo has the unsavoury habit of picking and choosing certain people and play power games with them. In general, Mr Picardo chooses people whom he feels are supporting the Opposition party or are somehow a threat for his position of power. The real reasons for Mr Picardo's dislike of certain individuals are at times completely beyond comprehension. The sad fact is that, when Mr Picardo dislikes someone, life will be made very difficult for this person. They might lose their Government housing, lose their jobs, their family's life might be made difficult, etc.
At some point Mr Picardo's eye must have fallen on my name, although I was very low profile and in no way involved in local politics. I simply did not pose any threat for Mr Picardo and his interests, whatever these may have been in those days. Since this moment, I have been suffering a constant persecution by Mr Picardo and his Government. I have met several other people in the same situation since, who became as well victims of Mr Picardo's "treatment", apparently because he needs manipulating his victims' lives to prove something to himself. Mr Picardo's behaviour is that of a malignant narcissistic and megalomaniac psychopath. In my case, Mr Picardo, completely unreasonably, blocked my British citizenship application for 6 years, although he had no legal right to do this. It took an intervention by the UK Government to unblock my application. The fact that I was not a British citizens during those 6 years, significantly reduced my rights to Government housing, several restricted Government jobs, the right to vote, etc. This caused me tens of thousands of pounds of missed benefits to which British citizens would automatically qualify.
At some point, Mr Picardo must have put the idea in his own mind that I was, or could become, a political opponent. Where he got this idea from, I have no clue. I have never been interested in politics, so the chances that I will ever stand for election are zero. Mr Picardo's paranoia resulted in a defamatory article in The New People, his party's political weekly newspaper. People in the know have assured me that it was Mr Picardo himself who wrote this article under an alias.
When I got finally fed up with Picardo's persecution, I started to criticise him and his Government on Facebook groups. I posted memes, caricatures and critical messages, in total a few hundred of them over the years. This must have annoyed Picardo tremendously as I did not play the game of many of his other victims who went into hiding, some of them even leaving Gibraltar. Picardo then went as far as sending the Royal Gibraltar Police to arrest me for the crime of "offending the Chief Minister". This led to my complaint against this unlawful arrest, which is at present under investigation, if it hasn't yet been brushed under the carpet.
Another example of Mr Picardo's psychotic behaviour is that he ordered his law firm Hassans to send intimidation letters to citizens who dared to publicly criticise him and his Government. Criticising politicians is using one's Constitutional freedom of speech, even when the criticism might be unwarranted. Politicians know that they will be criticised once elected, it's a choice they make when they decide to stand for election. The Chief Minister's failure to deal with criticism, and his intimidation letters, show a disrespect for Constitutional rights. Each of those letters cost the tax payer £3,000.
The talk of town in Gibraltar these days is about widespread corruption at all levels of Government and its institutions, including the civil service, police and courts. Gibraltar's Government has an absolute majority in Gibraltar's Parliament. This situation creates a de facto dictatorship as the Government can vote in favour of all its own proposed laws. This dictatorship, and lack of democracy, is extensively covered by the Llanito World blog by Robert Vasquez.
McGrail inquiry, abuse of powe Mr Picardo's Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party (GSLP), is only socialist in name and is widely accused of only benefitting the friends and families of the GSLP's inner circle. That there is corruption at the highest levels of Government, involving the Hassans law firm, has been analysed in several articles in the international press: a list of articles about Gibraltar's corruption.
"Except with his own consent, no person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of his freedom of expression, that is to say, freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference."