Editorial: Revolving doors keep spinning
Retiring politicians should not be allowed to take unfair advantage of the clout and access gained when they were in office
The revolving door of politics keeps spinning as government officials and former politicians leave office to become consultants or lobbyists. In recent years, the country has also experienced cases of state capture where lobbyists exerted undue influence on government ministers and public officials. Revolving doors present problems for democracy that largely go unrecognised, unaccounted for and unpoliced.
Former prime minister Joseph Muscat received a lucrative severance package when he left politics. Besides a six-figure severance pay, he benefited from other perks like a taxpayer-funded car, driver and office, a car and driver for his wife, a diplomatic passport and fully paid phone and internet services. Muscat now also claims to act as a legitimate, well-paid “consultant” to businesses he dealt with as prime minister, raking in over €480,000 in the year of his resignation.
While senior civil servants and regulators are already subject to a revolving door policy, politicians are not. Asked by Times of Malta about the possibility of revolving door policies to ensure that such situations would not happen again, Prime Minister Robert Abela argued: “Naturally, if you are to have a revolving door policy… it would mean that the country would need to bear the financial burden.”
Abela’s concern for the risk of burdening taxpayers with compensation for retiring politicians is surprising, considering the rampant waste of taxpayers’ money in failed government projects, like the privatisation of the management of three public hospitals.
Even more relevant, Abela’s claim of mandatory compensation for retiring politicians is false. A fact-check by Times of Malta concluded that, while it is within the state’s rights to provide financial compensation for elected officials who are serving a cooling-off period, this is not obligatory and is at the discretion of the government of the day.
The revolving door of politics makes it all too easy for corruption to occur because it creates problems not adequately policed by anti-corruption laws. Working in government in any capacity
provides invaluable knowledge to consultants and lobbyists.
The advantage is not merely informational: having worked with government officials means knowing them. The best consultants formerly involved in politics do not simply lobby a government contact: they lobby a friend.
While codes of conduct exist to prevent quid-pro-quo forms of corruption in politics, laws designed to prevent corruption among government officials and politicians are rarely enforced. This is because the law makes it almost impossible to prosecute corruption owing to difficulties with investigation, evidentiary rules and the burden of proof. The phenomenon of revolving doors complicates these problems exponentially.
If the prime minister is genuinely interested in restoring the people’s trust by raising ethical standards and reforming lobbying rules, he must move beyond “enjoying a discussion on revolving doors”. The country needs a law that would minimise the risk of conflicts of interest among retiring politicians who become consultants and lobbyists in the private sector. The revolving doors need to be slowed down to prevent the creation of an entire class of professional influencers who operate in the shadows, out of the public eye, unaccountable.
Retiring politicians must not be allowed to capitalise on the clout, access and experience gained when they were in office to lobby their former colleagues.
Those who take up elected office must remember that they were elected to be public servants. While they have every right to make a lucrative living after they retire from public life, they are not free to dispense with the standards it is meant to follow.