A journalist asked Finance Minister Clyde Caruana if he could live with the fact that Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo had awarded Film Commissioner Johann Grech a salary increase of €90,000.
His timid smile was one of a man who had just introduced a temporary 15 per cent subsidy on six brands of frozen broccoli to the enormous relief of pensioners and basic wage earners facing record inflation in food prices. Please forget the €130,000 spent on selling the Stabbiltà gimmick as a solution.
So, in his answer about Grech, he was as evasive as Edward Scicluna – his predecessor – who testified in the Daphne inquiry that his seven years in office were spent in the cold, outside the warm ‘kitchen cabinet’ of the Muscat-Schembri-Mizzi triad.
By 2016, we got to know that this inner sanctum of power was attended by some who owned brand new secret offshore companies in Panama. One attendee arranged a monthly salary of €13,000 for his wife that she got for years doing nothing in an imaginary office somewhere in China.
“We allocate each ministry a budget and then it is up to the individual minister to ensure that the money is spent well,” was Caruana’s short reply.
Nothing new here. With Labour, the concept of collective support in cabinet always trumps the rule of collective responsibility.
Yet, Caruana is no clown. Not yet, anyway. He still betrays some discomfort in having to defend his corrupt colleagues’ blatant theft of public funds and their almost daily financial abuses.
He is an unwilling loyalist of Robert Abela-Joseph Muscat brand of socialism where the working classes are taxed on their COLA adjustments at the same time that Castille makes millionaires out of lazy politicians, party donors, friends, lovers and family members through fake jobs, serial direct orders on bloated price contracts and rampant party cronyism. His job is to sign one-time handout cheques that are mailed to voters a week before elections.
Like any man with human intelligence, Caruana can see the cost of national debt rising skywards and the unavoidable years of austerity and increased poverty that are destined to follow.
Clyde Caruana’s job is to sign one-time handout cheques that are mailed to voters a week before elections- Eddie Aquilina
Meanwhile, Enemalta’s CEO announced plans to hire a heavy fuel portable generator for this summer and for next summer to avoid a repeat 2023 blackout summer that every village in the country had to put up with.
Energy Minister Miriam Dalli, visibly annoyed at the CEO’s lack of spin, came out swinging saying that Enemalta “has enough capacity to meet any present and future demand”.
This “only a standby” generator will put us back some €46,000,000, when, according to Dalli, the indication is that it will remain unwrapped till its return in 24 months’ time. This dubious deal has the same vibe as the Vitals deal, but only a tenth of the size.
As usual, we, the taxpayers, will again foot the bill, knowing that this is nothing but a panic knee jerk reaction to the debacle of last summer that caught her and her cabinet sleeping on the job 10 years since they came to power.
But, according to Caruana, no one, least of all the finance minister, should be concerned about the way ministers use or abuse their allocated budget. We are not surprised at any of them.
For over a decade, this administration has sat on the idea of a second interconnector while the infrastructure collapsed under the weight of its short-term tunnel vision economic policies. Their only new energy project was linked to a bribery scam involving millions.
For seven years, they handed over to foreign criminals using Swiss companies, and then to a ‘real deal’ company facing bankruptcy, annual payments totalling over €400,000,000. And when the country took it to court, they sided with the foreigner, not the country.
It’s time we learnt that we cannot get blood out of a stone.
Malta needs saving.