Tag Archives: 5

CiU’s man and the Mafia boss

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.

Can’t have it both ways: the ‘Cataloonies’

I don’t have much of a problem with the term ‘Cataloony’. But it does seem to be something of a handy shortcut past debating an issue which concerns a large minority of people here. John at Iberian Notes, ‘expat wanker’ according to a fan, loves using ‘Cataloony’ to describe any Catalan who dislikes the king of Spain or wants more independence for Catalonia. Statistically, some of those people probably are lunatics, so he probably scores a couple of hits with his scattershot.

The problem is, if I use the terms ‘dumb Yanks’ or ‘stupid Americans’* to describe American citizens who still support Georgey boy and his gang of no-good rats, then I’m being anti-American. Moi? But calling Catalan nationalists ‘loonies’ ain’t the same thing. See, I get more than a little whiff of hypocrisy from this. So my proposition is simple: either quit using the ‘Cataloonies’ tag or quit whining when someone has the temerity to insult one of your stupid countrymen (like your stupid president). Name calling is just as clever/silly, whatever side you’re on. It’s exactly the same thing and you can’t have it both ways.

Personally, as someone who believes in freedom of expression, I reckon that John should be able to call Catalan nationalists whatever he likes.

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*sorry, these names don’t quite have the same ring to them as Cataloonies. I’m not a very experienced name caller. It’s a short cut to thinking, really, isn’t it?