When Clyde Caruana, the public servant, became Labour’s finance minister there was hope that he would not turn out to be as servile as his predecessor who, after years in the job claimed to know nothing about anything.
One could have felt that Caruana, a technocrat, could restore a measure of financial responsibility into an administration run by people who operated in breach of proper standards and who often flew outside, around and above the law.
There was hope.
But politics in Malta is surprising, to say the least, or perhaps not, as it was only a matter of time before Caruana realised that, to survive in Labour, he owed obedience and allegiance foremost to the swindlers running the government of Malta and not to the country or its taxpayers, who are the people paying for Labour’s self-directed largesse.
Then, in early 2023, an opposition parliamentary question was put to Caruana asking the minister for the remuneration details of all the seven board members of our bankrupt always-late national airline, Air Malta. It wasn’t too difficult to reply to and the question didn’t need much research.
But idiots always fall foul of their own traps
To everyone’s patriotic satisfaction, Caruana informed parliament that the top man and CEO of the airline, David G Curmi, an accountant by profession, has been providing his services free of charge for the last 18 months.
In a government of incompetent political appointees awarding themselves salaries of upwards of €100,000 a year, there was an exception, Caruana told us.
But idiots always fall foul of their own traps.
It so happened that, then, The Shift won its long freedom-of-information fight against Caruana for a copy of Curmi’s contract with Air Malta and not one but two black cats flew out of the bag.
Caruana tried against all odds to hide a three-year contract with Curmi that drew an annual salary of €250,000, or, in simpler terms, a monthly government cheque of €21,500, double what many lower-paid workers get in a year. But this was only one of two deceptions.
Both Prime Minister Robert Abela and Caruana knew that Curmi’s CEO contract was drafted as being with the general government and not specifically with Air Malta. This was an ill-advised attempt to conceal a blatant violation of the EU’s State aid rules.
In the following days, now facing the charge of lying to the highest institution of the land before the standards commissioner, Caruana was forced to come clean in order to save what little was left of his personal reputation.
He wrote to the speaker and the commissioner confessing “with regret” to having also failed to declare that the CEO was being paid another extra €10,000 for attending the company’s board meetings.
It was against this background that we were informed by an inside ‘blogger’ that, only days ago, Caruana and Abela had come to blows in the latter’s office immediately after a heated exchange during a cabinet meeting.
The fisticuffs story has not been ‘categorically’ denied but it was noted that this was immediately followed by a convenient disclosure concerning Caruana’s private life and personal purchase of land and luxury villa development in Kalkara worth way beyond what one would have expected from a man whose short working life was always in the public service on ordinary conditions.
Are these the same ‘dark forces’ that fed the Daily Pakistan the Carmel Ciantar and Chris Fearne bribery stories in an attempt to punish the ever-growing list of those who want to oust and replace a weak prime minister along with his major U-turns and childish failings on a series of major issues?
Furthermore, why have we not been told that the US government has not only targeted Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri as personae non-gratae? It seems to have also blacklisted ISP/email addresses that originate from Malta. We’ll have to leave it up to Caruana’s successor to confirm or deny this.
It would not be before time for Caruana to resign: he came up with the idea of importing cheap labour from countries outside the European Union and is now warning about unsustainable population growth; he almost doubled Malta’s debt from €5 billion to €9 billion; and, to add insult to injury, he misled parliament, which is clearly a resignation matter if this country minimally respects itself.