Edward Scicluna was the Labour Party star candidate for the 2009 MEP election. He was the academic, mature, non-partisan, middle-of-the-road contender. He was the clever-clogs candidate, il-bravu.
As the stereotypical economics university professor, he was soft-spoken, calm, reasonable, a tad najxu, perhaps. Because he was always talking in a droning voice about complex money issues using language that we did not really understand, and because of his power doughnut – that ring of unshaved hair round his balding pate – he came across like a friendly, scrubbed up Christmas Carol Scrooge.
We all vaguely knew Scicluna. Every five years, he’d feature on the TVM election-day programme to regale us with the results of his scientific vote-sampling.
You could tell the outcome with the sound turned off. If a PN win was in the offing, Scicluna would be sombre and pale; but an impending Labour win, meant he’d be radiant and chirpy.
He was, of course, elected and headed to Brussels at the age of 63. His four-year stint at the European Parliament was relatively successful and he earned a salary of €100,000 – that’s €400,000 in four years. Not bad for a pension.
Come 2013, Joseph Muscat who has the talent of intuitively understanding people’s price, summoned him again to his office. He did not see in Scicluna the timid professor that we saw.
He realised that Scicluna yearned for two things: money and recognition. He wanted more people to be in awe of his academic wisdom – not just his students.
By then, Scicluna was 67 years old. He could have retired. Perhaps he could have kept on lecturing and enjoyed his savings and his family. But instead, he successfully contested the national elections and was promoted immediately to finance minister, a prestigious role loaded with responsibility. Now he earned an annual salary of €55,000 – which meant that by the end of his first legislature, at 71, he had pocketed another €220,000.
So far, so good.
Until 2016, that is, when the government he formed part of, started bleeding rot. Daphne Caruana Galizia and the Panama Papers revealed how then prime minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and his top minister Konrad Mizzi were involved in corrupt deals. Muscat defended them and kept them by his side.
Two Labour MPs, disgusted at the turn of events, resigned, disassociating themselves from the party. Scicluna stayed on. Like Muscat, the finance minister defended Mizzi and even gave him his vote of confidence.
When Muscat called an early election for all sorts of shifty reasons, Scicluna did not protest. When Mizzi was allowed to contest again, Scicluna did not demur, rather he campaigned with all his might and consequently kept his finance portfolio.
Not only. When the FIAU, which was under the responsibility of the finance ministry, suspected Schembri and Mizzi of money laundering, Scicluna made this big scene of being upset that the FIAU reports were being leaked. He was shocked by the leakages and not by the criminal content.
What can he teach our young students? The economics of corruption?- Kristina Chetcuti
Then Daphne was killed.
From then on, Malta was swamped in a cloud of permanent black news.
The Vitals healthcare deal; the American University of Malta; Electrogas; the Montegro wind farm: all criminal corrupt contracts out of which Schembri and friends were pocketing thousands a day. All costing us taxpayers millions. All financed by the government. All given the nod of approval by the finance minister.
Scicluna not only allowed Malta to be ruled by wicked men – he opened the vaults of our saved money and let them plunder, all the while covering his eyes, his ears and his mouth.
In his evidence in court during the Caruana Galizia public inquiry a fortnight ago, he tried to play the victim, the naïve, the najxu who had no idea what was going on. He invoked the Ghost of Money Past (“I had such a good salary as an MEP and I left!”), the Ghost of Money Present (“I could not resign as minister because I needed the money!”). “I may be greedy but not corrupt,” he seemed to want to tell us. Bah! Humbug!
The mask has now fallen off. He is no longer a nice old Scrooge. He is a very real one. Come to think of it, that’s an offence to Dickens’s character. Scicluna is not merely a miser; he is an unprincipled Scrooge who would stand by as robbers steal the crutches off Tiny Tim.
Some have said that Scicluna used greed as a cover up in court. That is not correct. The Ghost of Money Yet to Come is his undoing. His greed made him a willing accomplice and corruptible. As finance minister, he was almost as powerful as the prime minister: he held the public purse strings. He willingly funded all sorts of illicit projects and he did not attempt to stop them – even though as finance minister he is personally responsible for every single euro of citizens’ money. To this day, he still has not attempted to stop the projects and is still earning €55,000 from our taxes – for turning a blind eye.
Scicluna needs to be arraigned and interrogated about every single deal he presided over as a finance minister – whether he knew about it or not. And either way, he should be sacked from his ministry.
Most of all, he should be stripped off his professorship and banned from lecturing at the University of Malta. For what can he teach our young students? The economics of corruption?
Perhaps, only then, naked, stripped of his reputation and drowning in money, Edward Scrooge will realise that he is not so bravu after all.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti