Elit's English isn't even bad. I never have any problem understanding what he's saying and he has a certain eloquence when expressing his thoughts. If anything his use of grammar makes him unique. What I think is that Elit uses English vocab on a grammatical framework of his native language. Such interference is nothing more than normal and can be seen in many bilingual countries. For instance in Singapore you don't say "where are we going" but "go where" which is simply a more literal translation of what it would be in Chinese.

It seems Shai has problems being tolerant towards otherness. He is afraid of the "other" and thus resorts to flaming them, which IRL translates to him sympathizing with extreme right-wing parties. Elit's character is hard to deal with for him. On the one hand he expresses himself in a type of English that isn't considered mainstream and that some might look down upon. On the other hand Elit's IQ is a lot higher than Shai's, which means that Shai feels a certain unease, dissonance, since the mastery of the language does not match their relative intelligence. The same process can be seen at work versus Korp. Not being able to use the "poor English" argument on Korp yet also not being able to beat him into a fair argument, Shai decides to attack the person that Korp is. This is an RPG, we don't behave in here as we would do IRL or most of us would be without a job (well, I am currently without one, but let's just use it as a matter of speaking!).

I don't think we should go too much into the semantics of what's cheating and what is not. You only have to ask yourself 2 things:

1. What do the rules say.
2. What would the admin have done if he had 100% solid evidence of a province being traded.

Sure, rules might change but that's not really relevant.