The Vitals defendants deny they participated in a grand fraud amounting to €400 million of taxpayers’ funds despite a civil court judgment annuling the controversial hospitals’ privatisation deal it declared to be “fraudulent”.
The court of appeal went further, saying “senior government officials” were complicit in the privatisation fraud and that the government had failed in its duty to protect the national interest.
All the defendants can come up with are generic denials of direct personal involvement in illegal behaviour and claims of ignorance of grand fraud.
Their denials are politically worthless since they were, in fact, involved as government officials or their public role placed them in positions which required their participating in the deal. In this case, even claiming to be ignorant should have, at least, led automatically to their resignations, even more so of the people who promised us a ‘culture of resignations’.
Former minister Chris Cardona testified under oath in court that he signed the memorandum of understanding with Vitals because he was told to do so.
Ex-minister Edward Scicluna, who suspended himself as Central Bank governor on half pay, kept paying Steward with gusto and without query because he too was told to do so, he claims.
Social Policy Minister Michael Falzon claims ignorance about the benefits racket that went on in his ministry for years. In any decent country, he would resign and officials in his ministry would be prosecuted. But not in the third-world country Malta has become; here, claims of ignorance suffice, the guilty play musical chairs with no chairs removed and the police commissioner suns himself by the pool.
Former prime minister Joseph Muscat recently denied any impropriety in his monthly ‘consultancy’ payments and his role as promoter of the hospital fraud. That can pass for his Super One audience but not if we want to be a truly European country; indeed, ‘the best in Europe/the world’, as we were promised.
International financial institutions emphasise that one of the ways to bribe government officials is to engage them, afterwards, on dubious consultancy contracts. But, in Malta, Muscat, now charged in court with very serious crimes (to no credit of the police commissioner), wants his audience to believe that all his consultancies simply show that he is a capable person and his services are in demand.
A series of Labour prime ministers and ministers claim ignorance of what their colleagues and their persons of trust were doing.
Malta has become a third-world country- Eddie Aquilina
Labour, as a whole, claim ignorance of why politicians in power open secret companies in Panama and Dubai on the very morrow of taking their oath of loyalty to Malta.
Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri denies knowledge of the alleged identity card fraud and the alleged fines racket at LESA.
And the sophisticated and wide web of insiders complicit in setting up deliberate and detailed fraud schemes to get bribed: it all escaped the attention of those running our country.
The importation of immigrants from outside the EU to be exploited in a cheap labour economic policy did have its benefits for fraudsters at countless ministries. But the ministers and the governing party claim ignorance. And if you don’t want to be ignorant about foreigners fraudulently registered on your property, you ask the relative government departments, only to be denied this knowledge on ‘GDPR’ grounds.
The police commissioner is a hard man to find outside the confines of his pool, if it’s not about a migrant stealing a tuna can. It took the tragic murder of Nicolette Ghirxi to bring him in front of the cameras, only to claim that the victim herself refused a risk assessment. But her phone messages clearly show that it was the police that talked her out of a risk assessment. No sweat: the police commissioner claims ignorance.
We are living in a country run by people claiming ignorance. The ‘culture of resignations’ is for truly European countries, not for third-world Malta under Labour. We urgently need to save this country of ours.