Comparisons are odious, but assimilations between oranges and bad apples is dishonesty itself. The Minister for Education Evarist Bartolo, during his recent confessional stint, remarked that a prime minister’s equilibrium can be severely prejudiced by a chief of staff who exercises too much power within the kingdom.

He was obviously referring to the now toxic Keith Schembri. At the same time, in the usual what aboutism style of the decade, he also chose to point a same critical finger at one Richard Cachia Caruana, who was chief of staff to Eddie Fenech Adami for his two long legislatures.

The argument is that, once appointed, these alpha personalities are capable of reducing their political boss to a mere figurehead, a façade leader, a puppet beta dancing to the strings held by their alpha master.

Richard Cachia Caruana

Bartolo was clearly battling with the ever-increasing evidence coming to light in the courts and in the media of Joseph Muscat’s abject neglect of his duties as prime minister of our country. Clearly, Bartolo has been struggling for some time with the public’s growing realisation that their political leaders in Castille are happily involved in repetitive large scale corruption and that the perpetual impunity enjoyed by them and their foot soldiers like Neville Gafà can no longer be ignored.

Protests are becoming too frequent. Civil society is developing into a force of young and old to be reckoned with. Foreign news channels and journalists are taking note.  I will avoid repeating the list of well-documented scandals of the past six years which have been all connected directly to the cabal in Castille.

From Café Premier right through to the car bombing of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, all the world has come to see the role played by a weak and complicit prime minister hostage to the criminal gang, which even President George Vella has finally been moved to name and shame.

The ‘Castille Mafia’ is the cause of up to one billion of lost euros from the commonwealth of Malta. The crooked beneficiaries range from some hoping to make over €1 million a year for the next 18 years to a taxi driver assassin being bribed with a “ġobb mal-gvern”.

Bartolo is complaining that Schembri has been allowed a free rein to do anything he likes and even when caught with crimes of money laundering and kickbacks there has been complete immunity from police investigation.

He is also aware that this businessman is intimately connected to those implicated in the journalist’s assassination and he was allegedly busy immersing himself in the subsequent police investigation and secretly communicating with murder suspects when in police custody.

Despite being in the thick of things for a good 25 years, no one can raise a finger of accusation that Cachia Caruana ever put his handin the till

He sees the irreparable damage done to the country’s reputation and he laments and apologises for having done nothing effective to fight the good fight.

But he is completely obtuse in putting Fenech Adami and Cachia Caruana in the same basket as the dynamic duo of Muscat and Schembri.

In 1987, Malta itself was a basket case. The country needed a prime minister capable of the mammoth task of taking it out of the third world and out of its fourth world infrastructure. Its foreign policy needed to be swapped from being that of a Gaddafi satellite to one of a modern democracy aspiring to join the EU as a full member.

Fenech Adami needed a personal assistant with brains, determination and who was, above all, incorruptible. Cachia Caruana’s only drawback was his short temper with fools and his abrasive manner with colleagues. He had no favourites.

There is no doubt that he was fully aware of the power he could wield but there is also no doubt that he never used that power to corrupt himself or others.

He was charged with being Malta’s chief negotiator in obtaining the best results for EU entry after the positive 2004 referendum. In 2004, as our first EU Permanent Representative and then as PM Lawrence Gonzi’s adviser, he negotiated an excellent EU Malta budget for the years 2013 to 2020. Those EU funds have been a vital part of the economic success which Labour would like to take full exclusive credit for.

How ironic it is that Muscat and Schembri laboured in 2012 to engineer his dismissal.

Because despite Cachia Caruana being in the thick of things for a good 25 years, to this day, no one can raise a finger of accusation that he ever put his hand in the till.

Now look at Nexia BT and the men who opened their secret offshore companies the week they took power.

His only political enemies were one disgruntled Judas of Iscariot and a Labour opposition that moved a no-confidence motion in Parliament which called for his dismissal from public office. It was solely based upon numbers and void of any accusation of substance.

There has to be a footnote concerning the fact that, in 1994, Cachia Caruana was the victim of an attempted murder by stabbing by hit men allegedly paid by someone with a personal grudge. The prosecution was only partially successful in obtaining convictions for all those concerned. A pardon was also involved.

Twenty-two years later, there was a murder, a political assassination of an investigative journalist who was also at times abrasive and had no time for fools and corrupt politicians. A pardon was also involved. The main suspect mastermind alleges complicity with Schembri and other evidence points at the latter also meddling and trying to contaminate the ongoing investigations. All deny wrongdoing.

When Bartolo writes his life story, he will possibly mention both Schembri and Cachia Caruana. He will be able to claim having had an active hand in the latter’s dismissal and being a timid spectator in the suicidal downfall of the former.