“Now, you ain’t so smart and you ain’t good lookin’, tell me, how come you got so much cookin’? Ain’t nobody’s business but my own” – so went the old blues song sung by stars like Ella Fitzgerald.
I was thinking that these simple lines could easily be attributed to our former prime minister’s final days in power before recently becoming the backbench Popeye of the Labour Party.
For nigh seven years, Joseph Muscat (pictured, right) formally declared that his only earthly possessions were his Burmarrad house and €75,000 in savings, and that his only income was his government salary.
He had also declared that he never received personal gifts from business interests and those that he did accept he had generously handed over to the republic. The formal documentation was meant to be published in time for his sorrowful departure from Castille. It is now overdue.
It is none of our business how some ordinary citizen couple reportedly acquired first-class flight tickets to Dubai and holiday accommodation in Dubai and London for a few short days which must have cost something close to half their annual income. The taxman might make it his business and the Commissioner of Inland Revenue usually investigates anyone who lives like a millionaire in complete contrast to a declared annual income of no more than €60,000. In a normal country it might also attract the attention of the anti-money laundering police or the narcotics squad.
The problem here is that this millionaire’s lifestyle belonged to a prime minister who had been receiving a fixed middle bracket salary and who, with some tongue in cheek, complained of not being able to save a cent. This was suspicious to say the least.
It was all the more suspicious when that same prime minister sat at the head of the most corrupt Malta government ever seen and was the first prime minister to resign in disgrace.
When it comes to public office, the right to privacy takes a back seat
One cannot forget that, upon coming to power, Muscat immediately “reformed” the financial declaration rules for members of parliament creating a convenient loophole for himself and his fellow MPs who were married. The spouses’ assets were no longer subject to public scrutiny.
As a result, Muscat’s wife had and still has every right to secretly acquire and own any assets earned or gifted to her since 2013.
This means that the Muscats’ community of acquests could itself be hidden behind her private persona and that she need not account for any strange or out of the ordinary expenditure on both their part. She could be the owner of another six Bvlgari watches for all we know, but she is under no obligation to tell us that she owns them. But her husband, when prime minister, was. His business was our business.
If this was truly nobody’s business but his own, then he had no right to involve taxpayer monies and engage state institutions into the issue as to whether he or his wife were owners of Egrant Inc.
If it was nobody’s business but his own, then he should refund the taxpayers the €1.4 million spent at his request, in an attempt to change public opinion that pointed to them as Egrant, a view which he himself encouraged by protecting the men behind Tillgate Inc and Hearnville Inc.
If it was nobody’s business but his own, that seven figure cost of the Egrant inquiry should make the public cry tears at having to pay the bill for the biggest waste of time in history. And not him.
It is in this context therefore that the new member of the international unemployed will keep moaning that he has paid the highest price for the mistakes of others, as he loves to dramatically put it. What mistakes does he have in mind? He still will not say. Is it again nobody’s business but his?
In reality, he finally resigned nearly four years after the release of the Panama Papers; three years after the discovery of the 17 Black “business plans” and one year after the bribery connection was made to Electrogas.
So it would appear, by the process of simple elimination, that the reason for his resignation must be related to the accidental arrest of Melvin Theuma and the evidence of the involvement of Castille lackeys in the cover-up following the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia in October 2017, as well as the investigation of his closest associate at work as a suspect accomplice.
How many of his former ministers were and are still under criminal investigation?
Which prime minister of a supposedly Westminster style of government tolerates keeping such ministers in charge of mega public contracts, private public contracts, the country’s finance portfolio and the economy portfolio? We need to ask our new prime minister this same question.
Muscat has left Castille also failing to say why Konrad Mizzi was forced to resign in tandem with Keith Schembri. We know that everything Mizzi touches turns into a rotten deal for the public but he has not been mentioned at all in connection with the assassination. Did we have a right to know why Mizzi was also kicked out of cabinet by the party or is that also nobody’s business?
We await the outcome of the Standards Commissioner’s investigations, and those of the anti-corruption tribunal, into Muscat’s largesse with himself when he held Castille in the palm of his hands. Our only hope is that his former well-paid consultant, and now successor, will realise that when it comes to public office, paid by the public, the right to privacy takes a back seat.