The prime minister tells us that Edward Scicluna, now accused of serious crimes, is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He fails to point out that this legal concept only applies within the four walls of the criminal court.
Outside court, it’s a completely different ball game.
Every public officer, elected or not, is responsible for his or her decisions or lack of action while in office.
When their acts are shown to be wrong and prejudicial to the public, then citizens rightly presume they are either incompetent or guilty of wrongdoing or, in most cases, both.
Scicluna is an economist and an academic who was given the job of finance minister in 2013. That job included choosing the direction of the economy and monitoring the country’s expenditure and level of debt.
Edward Scicluna continued to vote, year after year, in favour of huge payments to Vitals and Steward
When the Joseph Muscat cabinet signed the €4 billion hospitals deal with strangers, knowing that these people had no experience in healthcare, the good professor claims he was left outside the ‘kitchen’. He only heard about it when the evening news showed a confident Muscat touting it as a great “just wait and see” foreign investment.
Scicluna continued to vote, year after year, in favour of huge payments to a non-performing theatre act of Vitals and then Steward. He never bothered to look into the contract or to find out who were the people actually behind it.
He only came to his senses eight years later when he slipped away from politics to grab a salary and perks as Central Bank governor. His case is not unique.
Our standards commissioner recently shown great wisdom when dealing with a large group of ministers who devised a clever scheme on how to appoint their own wives, partners or relatives to cushy jobs in their own ministry.
After a deep and thorough investigation, he awoke to find that no written rules were broken when these conspired to a convenient mutual arrangement of “I’ll appoint yours, you’ll appoint mine”.
It is no wonder that ordinary people have lost hope in this administration.
In the past few months, three major fraudulent schemes have been exposed. After a driving licence racket came a multi-million fake disability pension racket. And, now, we have the fake identity cards racket, which even the Italian authorities have taken into account by immediately making passport identification mandatory.
These scams have been operating for years under the nose of three different ministers. They involved persons of trust in a society where everybody knows everybody. And, yet, these ministers all deny personal knowledge of what was going on inside their own ministry.
How can one accept claims of ministerial ignorance when one private citizen, acting alone, without the aid of the police or other public authority, succeeds in unearthing and publishing detailed and documented evidence of these mega scams?
A German dictator once said that the bigger the lie, the more it is believed.
Robert Abela recently claimed that there was not one drainage leak on the island. As he said it, there were “no swimming” health notices displayed at no fewer than four bays around the island.
This is a prime minister who proudly spent €37 million on a temporary diesel generator to meet the increased demand of summer months. The chances are that it will be available just around the end of summer.
This wonderful solution to the energy crisis is part of Labour’s version of private-public cooperation based on inside information, knowing who to call and who to talk to.
Oh dear, my electricity has gone off again.
Eddie Aquilina