An interesting story has been bubbling away for several months. Antoní Fernández Teixidó, a CiU member of the Catalan Parliament, failed to turn up at court the other day for a hearing into his links with Malchas Tetruashvili, an alleged Georgian mafia boss. Apparently, during an anti-mafia operation, police found a letter from Teixidó, written on official notepaper, thanking the Georgian for dinner. The mafia guy could then take that note and show people how well connected he was. It’s an old trick, but a pretty stupid one as most people don’t write a note on official notepaper to say thanks for dinner. It makes you look a bit odd. Hopefully more details on the case will emerge soon.
My favourite bit so far is some of the information surrounding Teixidó’s failure to turn up at court. Officials said that he must have known about the case because they’d sent him a telegram. A telegram! One wonders why they didn’t send the pigeons like normal.
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By the way: you may have noticed some strange characters and symbols cropping up in my posts. There’s some sort of problem with my character encoding settings which I don’t currently have time to look into.
I was once in a coastal town down Tarragona way when suddenly out of the main bar came a procession of short fat swarthy gentlemen in dark glasses in what appeared to be an Albanian remake of the Godfather. I inquired in the bar, and was told they had been flown across by local officials who thought they might like to invest some of their hard-earned gains in holiday developments. Was this one of Antoní’s schemes, or is there more of this going on? It’s all rather exciting.