The Electrogas power station, towering over the entrance to Marsaxlokk Bay, has become a visible monument to the corrupt dealings and abuse of power that characterised the premiership of Joseph Muscat.
The list of alleged wrongdoings surrounding the power station is long, some more odious than others. They bear repeating now to show that calls for a public inquiry into the project are justified.
The worst in the list of alleged misdeeds is, of course, the connection, through former Electrogas director Yorgen Fenech, with the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. He denies the charge of complicity in her murder.
The strong suspicion is that at least one motive for the killing lies somewhere deep in the financial interests surrounding the project, a Labour Party electoral pledge on which the government banked its future.
When she was eliminated, Caruana Galizia was investigating the relevant contracts through a voluminous cache of leaked files.
Fenech owned the Dubai-based company 17 Black, which was later exposed as a source of alleged kickbacks to be paid into the Panama companies of Muscat’s then chief of staff Keith Schembri and minister Konrad Mizzi, both involved in the deal-making.
The list goes on. The National Audit Office found “multiple instances of non-compliance” in the successful bid, and that the bids were assessed by the same person who had set up those Panama companies.
A €360 government guarantee on a €450 million Electrogas loan was irregular, and all project risks were transferred to the government, the NAO also found.
It has since been revealed that the government agreed to defer for 18 years an €18 million penalty for late delivery of the project and that Mizzi had transferred to Enemalta €40 million in excise duties owed by Electrogas.
There is also the not-so-small matter of the tens of millions the taxpayer is losing for the supply of gas to the power station at a fixed price.
The Electrogas affair is a terrible blot on the Labour government. It will continue to drag down Malta’s reputation and undermine trust in Robert Abela if he does not allow an attempt to get behind the veil of secrecy.
In this light, he should be supporting the opposition’s call to appoint an independent public inquiry. Instead, the prime minister dismissed it with a weak and deceptive argument: that holding such an inquiry would “circumvent the law courts”.
What could he be talking about? The impending trial of Fenech? The magisterial inquiry into 17 Black appointed two years ago? The attempt to find the whistleblower behind the leaked files? There is no sign of a police investigation into the alleged corruption.
Even if this were happening, the prime minister, being a lawyer, knows that a public inquiry, a well-established practice in democracies, fulfils a different function to judicial procedures.
The opposition wants to find out if any abuses were committed in the political, commercial or administrative spheres of the project.
And only an inquiry that is public can assure the public that the relevant processes were carried out correctly and transparently, and if not, establish who was responsible and propose remedies.
The public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s murder seeks to establish whether the government could have prevented it or had some sort of direct or indirect role in it.
Because truth matters. The country needs it badly in relation to both the murder and Electrogas.
Only the truth can start to fix the serious political, social and reputational damage that both have caused this country.
One way or another, it will have to come out.