# MERRY CHRISTMAS. UNTO US A CHILD IS BORN AND THE SILLY SEASON IN FIJI IS IN FULL SWING.

For the second year in a row, Christmas Eve in Fiji and the days immediately before it have gone way beyond the usual preparations for feasting and worship to provide us all with some startling distractions.

Last Christmas Eve, it was the President, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, confirming his relative by marriage, Salesi Temo, as Chief Justice without informing the Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, in violation of the Constitution. Or at least that’s the story that was peddled to a stunned public after Temo’s disastrous tenure as acting CJ, including three Supreme Court judges finding that he had breached the Constitution by appointing John Rabuku as Acting DPP after bungling the removal of Christopher Pryde.

It’s a mess that still hasn’t been resolved and Salesi Temo has compounded his disastrous tenure by being accused by the Ashton-Lewis Commission of Inquiry of perjury and obstructing and perverting the course of justice. Yet still he remains in office – the first CJ to be allowed to pass judgment on others (the Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum verdict is pending and unconscionably late) while accused of serious criminal conduct himself.

A year on and there is still a crisis in the Judiciary with Salesi Temo at its head, rooted in his chronic inability to properly understand the law. Within rapid succession yesterday, we saw two events unfold that underline Temo’s incompetence and complete unsuitability to preside over the criminal justice system.

First, Christopher Pryde won an application for leave to apply for a judicial review of Temo’s decision to suspend his salary. The CJ continues to refuse to do his constitutional duty and suspend the substantive DPP and set up another Tribunal of judges to try him if he really believes Pryde is a “thief” (Temo’s words at the last Tribunal hearing) and has fiddled his expenses.

And then within hours, an even bigger disaster – the thwarting of Temo’s attempt to engineer a settlement between the Judicial Services Commission that he heads and the State to effectively derail the Ashton-Lewis Commission of Inquiry. What were the terms of that settlement? The parties refuse to tell us. But by day’s end, Justice David Ashton-Lewis succeeded through his lawyer, Hemendra Nagin, in challenging the legal basis of any settlement that doesn’t include him as the presiding CoI judge and a defendant in the proceedings.

Justice Dane Tuiqereqere has put any settlement on hold until he hears that challenge on New Year’s Eve, next Wednesday. But how on earth could the JSC, Salesi Temo himself and the incompetent Solicitor General, Ropate Green Lomavatu, get the law so wrong that they didn’t know that what they were trying to do simply cannot be done – that a Supreme Court Commission of Inquiry’s findings can’t be the subject of a settlement between an aggrieved party and the State?

Temo’s incompetence seems to know no bounds. Yet that is also the case with the other Malevolent Four Grubsheet identified in our article yesterday – (from left to right below), the drink driving Chief Registrar, Tomasi Bainivalu, the dullard who occupies the job of Solicitor General, Ropate Green, the grossly incompetent Acting Attorney General, Siromi Turaga, and Temo himself, who we described as the Lord Voldermort of the judiciary – Dr Evil at the pinnacle of a sh*tshow.

Yes, the state totters in the hands of these idiots, who survive only because Sitiveni Rabuka insists on inflicting them on the criminal justice system. But with both the Pryde judicial review and the challenge to the authority of the State to strike a settlement relating to a Supreme Court Commission of Inquiry, two further comeuppances beckon. How much longer can this farce go on?

Then we have had some extraordinary scenes arising from the celebrations marking the return of our latest batch of UN peacekeepers. The most visible surprise was the return to public prominence of Frank Bainimarama as a key member of the establishment in the wake of his jail term – his evident rehabilitation in what passes for polite society even though he faces further charges and perhaps another stretch in the slammer.

Many people would have been astonished to see Sitiveni Rabuka and Frank Bainimarama shaking hands, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu and Frank Bainimarama shaking hands and the former prime minister as honoured guest both at the “welcome home” military parade and subsequent reception at State House. Why? Because it all masks a great deal of raw hatred.

What does it all mean? Has Frank buried the hatchet with the “Snake” and the “Pedo President”? Is the wily Rabuka trying to suck up to Bainimarama to try to defuse any resentment that might lead to Bainimarama taking a lead role in crusading against the People’s Alliance at the forthcoming election? While he can’t contest the election himself, there’s nothing to stop him campaigning for whoever he chooses. And that’s precisely what we can expect as polling day approaches. Even if it’s from a jail cell.

The pictures from State House make it all seem very cordial. And while we all know Frank hasn’t always been the sharpest tool in the shed and depended heavily in government on Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, he has rat-like cunning in spades. And believe me. As someone who was close to him before and after the return to parliamentary rule in 2014, there will be a plan. The only question is what.

This wasn’t a man defeated by his time behind bars but someone exuding confidence and comfortable in his own skin. And also surrounded on the night by old friends and comrades, including the two most loyal of his own officers when he was RFMF Commander, Ben Naliva and Aseri “Rocky” Rokoura, who are now part of the new order under Major General Ro Jone Kalouniwai.

That’s Ben Naliva on the left – who was forced out of the Australian military amid human rights abuse allegations during the 2006 coup – and “Rocky” Rokoura second from the right next to the Love Rat. (More on him later).

Where do all of them stand on the recent challenge to Kalouniwai’s authority by Manoa Gadai, the Joint Task Force Commander in the West?

Gadai is back in his box after an official reprimand, for the moment at least, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on in the coming weeks and months. Because we know from his recent outburst that Gadai isn’t at all happy about police and military involvement in the drug trade and Frank and the others won’t be either. And drugs is the one issue capable of galvanising public opinion behind a more radical intervention than we’ve seen thus far.

But moving on. I’ve made the observation before that trying to work out what is going on at the top in Fiji is as opaque as the task that faced Kremlin Watchers in the old Soviet Union. Yet there were lots of juicy tit-bits in the pictures posted on the government Facebook page taken at the state reception for the returning troops.

LYNDA TABUYA BOTH ASSERTS HERSELF AND SHOOTS HERSELF IN THE FOOT

The Coalition’s Minister for Information and now for Environment and Climate Change is using the government’s Facebook page to promote herself and position herself for next year’s election.

Her ministry’s coverage of the State House reception is peppered with photographs of the shameless hussy herself. And she is deliberately placing herself front and centre at the apex of the establishment, including the following photo with the wives of the Prime Minister and the President.

The none-too-subtle message is: “I’m back, you losers, and right back at the top. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it”. Wrong.

Rumour has it that Lynda Tabuya literally bought her way back into favour by donating $250,000 to the People’s Alliance. And rumours also persist that she also bought off the Prime Minister with his $150,000 gold Rolex, the source of which he refuses to disclose. Yet whatever the truth, Tabuya is so gormless that she has also given FICAC more of the evidence it needs to nail her for perjury.

How? With a couple of Facebook photographs at State House with Rob Semaan – the man she claims to have divorced in 2016 but to whom she is very much married.

The corruption watchdog is reported to again be actively investigating Tabuya after Justice David Ashton Lewis raised the prospect in the CoI Report of a “sham divorce” to escape having to declare Semaan’s millions as co-owner of Pacific Building Solutions – Fiji’s biggest construction company. You would think that any normal person would keep hubby in the background. But not our Lynda, who is openly parading him in public even as she faces possible charges of making a false income declaration to the Elections Office. Just like Biman Prasad.

Question. Do these two look divorced to you, Fiji?

Even more brazen is a photo of Lynda and Rob standing next to the British High Commissioner to Fiji, Kanbar Hossein-Bor, who evidently doesn’t know the colourful history of Mr and Mrs Semaan or he’d be standing somewhere else.

What history? Well, fleeing America with unpaid debts of more than $100-million Fijian, Mrs Semaan cuckolding Mr Semaan with “brutal sex” in Room 233 of the Windsor Hotel with her fellow Minister, Aseri Radrodro, and Mrs Semaan making a pornographic video which she said was for Mr Semaan but was allegedly for her lover in the British Army.

Or maybe the British High Commissioner just thinks all of this is local custom, like the sulu he has adopted as he also takes Fijian language lessons, emulating his Australian counterpart, Peter Roberts, in “going native” to ingratiate themselves with the “natives”.

Certainly, His Britannic Majesty’s High Commissioner to Fiji cut an incongruous figure in the stately building where once successive British governors wore not sulus but tropical whites and pith helmets topped with ostrich feathers.

So His Excellency the British High Commissioner and His Excellency the High Commissioner for Australia both think it’s good diplomacy to adopt national dress in Fiji.

Here’s the Aussie with Ro Filipe Tuisawau in our recent story in which we admonished him for his “try-hard” cultural appropriation and suggested he put his trousers back on.

Yet not only has the Aussie in the sulu now infected the Iranian Brit with his sartorial silliness, Peter Roberts has gone a step further by wearing an RFMF necktie to a State House reception, accompanied by his military attache with a crooked cap.

Struth. What a pair!

Wearing a sulu is one thing. But why is Australia’s official representative in Fiji wearing the insignia of a foreign military force? And one which committed multiple human rights abuses in four coups over the past four decades and spends most of its time nowadays apologising for its conduct?

Everyone understands that Australian diplomats need to engage with the RFMF. But by whose authority back in Canberra do they wear the necktie of the local military to official functions in Fiji?

Would the Australian Ambassador to Indonesia wear the necktie of the Indonesian military? Would the Australian Ambassador to Russia wear the necktie of Putin’s forces? Even Sitiveni Rabuka – the Prime Minister and former head of the RFMF – didn’t wear his RFMF tie to the state reception, opting instead for something in Trumpian red.

But make no mistake. The red and green tie is the tie of the RFMF. Are the Australians now so close to the Fijian military that they are wearing their insignia as well as keeping them out of the clutches of the Chinese?

Here’s who else wears the tie.

And now the Australian High Commission has joined the “club” as a fully fledged member. At least that’s the take-home message Peter Roberts is projecting and it seems certain to be viewed as a pretty unsubtle message by Lynda Tabuya’s mate, the Chinese Ambassador, Zhao Xian.

Has he got an RFMF tie too? We’ve all heard of penis envy. But tie envy? Is that the latest in diplomatic manoeuvring? The tell-take sign of who’s out and who’s in?

The message to China is that the Aussies and the RFMF are close. That close that the top Aussie diplomat in Fiji wears an RFMF tie to a state event. And both the Aussies and the British are so close they’ve taken to wearing Fijian national dress. Will the Chinese Ambassador soon don a sulu in a tit-for-tat response?

Will Lynda be able to arrange an RFMF tie for him? After all, isn’t there an argument that if we are to be “friends to all and enemies to none” in our “ocean of peace”, neckties should be handed out to everyone who has the country in a noose?

All this “intelligence” gleaned from just one Facebook posting. The Kremlin Watchers of old would have been green (and red) with envy. Certainly Grubsheet couldn’t believe how much we were able to learn as we scanned through the Information Minister’s latest photo album.

Every picture is worth a thousands words, goes the old saying, and that’s certainly how the following picture will be greeted by FICAC investigators gathering evidence of Lynda Tabuya’s “sham divorce”.

Yet imagine how these two must feel – and especially Rob Semaan – when Lynda’s “brutal” lover from Room 233 – Aseri Radrodro – was in the same room.

That’s the problem with small countries like Fiji. You’re continually bumping into husbands who have bumped your wife behind your back or wives you’ve bumped behind their husband’s backs, along with a whole lot of other people you’d rather not see.

Of course, it can also be very amusing, especially if you’re not the subject of lurid gossip, just trading in it like the rest of us.

But for Grubsheet, the biggest laugh of the week – if you can call it a laugh – came from an extract of an article by Richard “I have the means” Naidu in Saturday’s Fiji Times on his criticism of the government’s Referendum Bill.

This is what he said – quoting his little mate Charlie Charters – in yet another demonstration of how incestuous the “in crowd” is in Fiji when you get close to the top. And how deluded.

Get that Fiji? “One of the major, and often forgotten, achievements of the Coalition Government has been a significant strengthening of the judiciary”.

Good one, Richie. And we laughed and we laughed and we laughed.

This Christmas Eve, Fiji, the judiciary, indeed the entire criminal justice system, is in a state of absolute chaos under the buffoon who stands accused of serious criminal conduct himself and is desperately fighting to stay in the job of Chief Justice and stay out of jail.

And Richard Naidu tells us it has “been significantly strengthened”? That’s the level of self-delusion that has taken hold among certain elite members of the rapidly aging “new order”. But perhaps Richie Rich is just sucking up to the CJ to soften up the judiciary to go easy on Biman Prasad, his other little mate and client.

All in all, it’s enough to drive anyone to strong drink this Christmas Eve. But for all that, Grubsheet will endeavour to enjoy the festivities as best we can in a state of responsible sobriety and wishes the same for our long-suffering readers.

May the true Christmas spirit of peace and goodwill descend on you and yours as we celebrate the Christ Child who Christians believe was sent to save the world from itself.

Unfortunately that remains a work in progress but it is still our only hope. Because the way things are in Fiji right now, only God, it seems, can save us from the influence-peddlers, wannabes, main-chancers, spivs and outright crooks all around us.

Merry Christmas!

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The background to the latest FICAC investigation into Lynda Tabuya from a Grubsheet article back in August. To be read in conjunction with the above:

# THE PERSISTENT SCANDAL THAT WILL HAUNT LYNDA TABUYA ALONG WITH ALL THE OTHERS – THE VERY MARRIED “DIVORCED” MINISTER FOR INFORMATION

POSTSCRIPT:

The changing nature of Britain’s relationship with Fiji.

1953:

2025:

Ineffably sad.