The pandemic may have distorted our time perception but we weren’t going to forget that it has been a year since Malta took to the streets to demand an end to the most corrupt administration ever.
Joseph Muscat and his cronies faced a reckoning and a disgraced exit that was meant to signal a seismic shift in Maltese politics. Instead, what we got was a continuity in the form of an apologetic administration that puts corruption second only to incompetence.
While we might have bid farewell to the showy (and costly) press conferences to showcase (even costlier) projects to embezzle public funds in innovative ways, Labour’s corruption game is far from over. The protests a year ago established a decided lack of appetite for corruption. But the frontlines of the anti-corruption movement have moved up the steps of Great Siege Square and into the courts.
Besides the interminable magisterial inquiries, to which Malta’s not-so-new Central Bank governor Edward Scicluna remains subject, the public inquiry has been instrumental in shining a harsh light on once untouchable protagonists.
The inquiry is not a denouement to bring to a close an embarrassing chapter in Malta’s history; it’s there as a first step to begin answering a long list of questions that have accumulated over seven frustrating years.
That list of questions is still getting longer.
One question of interest is why it took so long for the Maltese government to act seriously on the corruption that plagued the Muscat administration. Practically anything Konrad Mizzi touched is tainted with backhanded deals and dodgy people.
Any attempt at serious scrutiny ended up faltering very quickly, no doubt thanks to pressure exerted by holders of political office.
Today, we know the pressure to stop those investigations always came from the top. Disgraced ex-attorney general Peter Grech effectively advised the police, whose job it is to act on reports of crime, not to act on the Panama Papers. Conflicts of interest were rampant. The incoming MFSA chief and Gaming Authority CEO travelled to Las Vegas with Yorgen Fenech. Nothing else need be said of ex-police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar.
Robert Abela cannot claim he was dealt a bad hand while he insists on playing the same game as his predecessor
The FIAU had reportedly sought information on 17 Black back in 2016. Daphne Caruana Galizia named 17 Black for the first time early in 2017. Yet, the intelligence was only handed to the police over a year later, in 2018. The police economic crimes unit acted with breakneck speed to retrieve information from the United Arab Emirates, taking nine months to complete a botched request. And Robert Abela has the face to accuse us of Malta’s dwindling financial reputation.
The Emirates are finally on the brink of sharing vital information on Fenech’s company, linked with the Panama companies of Keith Schembri and Mizzi. It is a welcome development, one that shouldn’t have required my intervention if Malta’s institutions functioned properly.
Who will shoulder political responsibility for this shameful response to the suspicion of crime?
Only a serious inquiry can settle it. Because if it were up to Abela, ex-legal advisor to Muscat’s united (kitchen?) cabinet, nobody is responsible. Not even Scicluna, who had an important part to play in making sure no action was taken against corruption while Muscat was in power.
Is Abela sick of the incompetent and/or corrupt political figures that enabled Muscat to bring Malta’s reputation to its knees? His rewarding of those politicians with cushy salaries in powerful positions screams of nothing if not continuity of what the Maltese people protested against a year ago. If anything, he would rather that the public inquiry close shop, the sooner the better. What could he possibly have to lose?
One by one, Labour politicians took to the stand in the public inquiry and claimed that it was beyond their sphere of influence to stop the momentous takeover orchestrated by Schembri and company. One by one, those Labour politicians are inexplicably being rewarded for their spineless loyalty by Abela.
It isn’t as if total loyalty within the cabinet has resulted in particularly stable governments.
How many snap elections and cabinet reshuffles does the country have to endure, each time seeing corrupt politicians rewarded and wrongdoing forgiven? No amount of shiny taxpayer-funded PR campaigns can erase the fact that the same people responsible for enabling corruption are still in office today.
Malta’s apologist excuse for the lack of results was that Dubai is a secretive jurisdiction. It speaks volumes when a ‘secretive jurisdiction’ is more enthusiastic about solving the case against Schembri, Mizzi and Fenech than the Maltese government.
The latest cabinet reshuffle is not a renewal, it’s a reaffirmation of the fact. Abela cannot claim he was dealt a bad hand while he insists on playing the same game as his predecessor.
David Casa, Nationalist MEP and Quaestor of the European Parliament