These days, Joseph Muscat seems incapable of defending his conduct without revealing just how poor his sense of State is.
Take the gift of three bottles of fine Petrus vintage wine he received from Yorgen Fenech. Sources close to Muscat have confirmed that the bottles, valued at just under €6,000, are registered as gifts belonging to the State.
Muscat’s reported public statements make the issue turn entirely on who receives the gifts: politician or State. Nonsense. Gifts create a bond between giver and receiver, irrespective of who the receiver is. They create a relationship that could compromise the State as much as a politician.
A gift, once accepted, creates an obligation – or the expectation of one – to reciprocate in the future. Practically every Maltese adult has had, at some point, to wriggle out of receiving a gift pressed insistently on us by someone we wished to avoid. We didn’t fancy being asked for a future “favour”.
States have no issue with ceremonial exchanges of gifts with other States. It’s a declaration of good diplomatic relations. But a gift from a businessman to a State? At the very least, it would give the impression of special ties of obligation, while the State must be strictly neutral between businessmen.
The wine was given at a birthday party hosted by Muscat in February. By then, Fenech was already prime suspect. Muscat knew it. He says not to have invited Fenech would have alerted him that something was wrong.
Muscat has continually fudged his closeness to Fenech
To be clear, there is nothing bogus about inviting Fenech so as not to alert him (even if Fenech seems to have been kept well informed about police investigations through other sources). There are precedents. Back in the 1970s, on the advice of the West German security services, Chancellor Willy Brandt went ahead with a private holiday in the company of a close aide suspected of being a Communist agent.
What’s deeply wrong is something else. How close must Muscat have been to Fenech if not inviting him to a select birthday party would have raised Fenech’s suspicions?
Muscat has continually fudged his closeness to Fenech. He’s said he was used to meeting a wide range of businessmen. How many of them would have been dumbfounded not to be invited to a birthday party?
Gifts create bonds and celebrate existing bonds. Nothing Muscat has said dispels the idea of a closeness with Fenech that, at best, reeks of gross political misjudgement. It’s the kind of thing over which politicians resign (as Brandt eventually did after the aide’s arrest). What Muscat offers as defence would politically condemn him elsewhere.
We’ve come a long way in seven years. All the way from being outraged that the former PN Finance Minister, Tonio Fenech, accepted a clock worth some €500 from another businessman. It’s been such a long journey that two other suspected donations have barely registered.
Widespread sleaze corrupts public expectations. Standards adjust and drop, little by little
The full Egrant report contains an interesting observation by the inquiry’s experts about the once-secret Panama companies, Tillgate and Hearnville, respectively belonging to Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. The experts say it was not Nexia BT’s custom to open Panama companies without already having specific clients in mind. Nexia BT would have had to pay several thousand euros in fees for these companies. Nexia BT’s usual practice was to recoup such expenses. But they found no trace of such payments from Schembri and Mizzi.
The experts speculate that Nexia BT waived such fees in this instance, given the closeness of the firm to both men. This information has attracted little comment. Understandably, there were much more momentous revelations being released at the same time.
But these fees are no minor matter. They would have amounted to around 13 times the value of Tonio Fenech’s much maligned clock.
If Nexia BT really did waive the fees, that would have constituted an unacceptable gift. A firm only waives such fees because of a relationship based on quid pro quo.
If all this seems small fry in 2020, reflect on how much public standards have changed since 2013. Then, the crusade against Fenech was conducted precisely because the public was expected to be outraged.
In the same period, the public was also expected to be outraged by the news that the then PN minister, Austin Gatt, had failed to register a Swiss bank account in his parliamentary declaration of assets, even though it had always been declared to the taxman (and was known to have been inherited from his father, who had opened it decades earlier, with no subsequent deposits by the son).
And, some years earlier, the public had been expected to be outraged that the then PN general secretary, Joe Saliba, had taken a holiday on a developer’s yacht. ONE news led the charge.
Yet, by last year, equivalent stories barely registered. Gatt’s case is no different from the income not declared to Parliament by the junior ministers, Silvio Schembri and Deo Debattista. Schembri and Debattista even took offence at the idea that they did anything seriously wrong.
And, by 2019’s standards, Saliba’s jaunt and Fenech’s clock seem mere peccadillos.
My point is not that it was wrong to be outraged in the past. It’s to show how much public sensibility to politicians’ behaviour has been blunted. Widespread sleaze corrupts public expectations. Standards adjust and drop, little by little, until we’re tolerating stuff we’d not have countenanced just some years earlier.
That’s what is missed by the people seeking an explanation for our current mess in some perennial Maltese culture. Our public culture was never exemplary but it has evidently changed for the worse in a few short years.
It was corrupted. We let it happen. We let down our guard. We were influenced by those who demanded that we be “reasonable” and not exaggerate. Here’s a 2020 resolution: never again.