Every two months or so, a government minister throws a party for a few dozen people, spending €30,000 to €40,000 of taxpayers’ money. The cost can be calculated at some €600 per capita for a two-hour get-together of officials and party members. The splurge is well within the guidelines set by Finance Ministry.
But times have changed. Let’s face it.
Finance Minister Edward Scicluna is no fool when it comes to economics. He knows that when you borrow money, you have to pay it back. And at university he was taught that when you are handling your client’s money you must treat as ‘if it was your own’.
In 2013, someone ordered him to drop the ‘if it was’.
He was told that with the hundreds of millions coming through Henley & Partners it was going to be so easy to fill the hole that was about to disappear from the public purse.
The then prime minister himself travelled to IIP conferences to drum up business for the sale of our citizenship to hundreds of people who needed, like his former star energy/tourism minister and chief of staff, to hide their ‘commissions’ behind different names in faraway shady places.
The hole they dug after seven years amounts to more than €1 billion. The revenue from a short-term, free-for-all, construction-driven economy also helped to fill this void, and they all managed to boast and toast a glorious surplus of a few million euros. The trolls were ecstatic at being given a new word to play with.
The hole they dug after seven years amounts to more than €1 billion
Edward Scicluna is no fool either when it comes to government corruption. He knows that you can only live with it for a limited time. He has spent the last seven years living exclusively on his declared income and yet being politically subservient to the gang of criminals that ran and ruined the central government. The clear evidence of their crimes against the state he always shrugged off as mere allegations.
And so while the corruption virus was more or less hidden and under control, the “u ejja come on” man could look serious and play it cool. Then last March, just like events in March 2016, trouble came calling at the door. In an instant, already falling passport sales dropped to near nothing in the wake of COVID-19.
He now earned the unenviable job of coming up with some €40 million a month to pay an ersatz wage to some of the 80,000 viral unemployed while competing against the huge waste of Steward, against the kickbacks in the Socar gas bills and a score of other corrupt deals secured by the ingenuity of the triad, as our local Bobby on the Beat whistles a sea shanty tune pretending to look the other way.
So when the proposed help from Brussels came mainly in the form of loans, and not exclusively of handouts, our Edward suddenly felt the painful prick of the pear. He rushed to Cabinet saying: my goodness, for a change, we might have to actually be careful on how we spend this EU money!
And Edward Scicluna is also no fool when it comes to understanding supply and demand. He knows that since March, government revenue from ordinary economic activity has dropped drastically.
The hole is back and getting deeper and deeper. He can also see the proximity of an eventual crash of the construction industry, and the realisation by the financial services sector that there are countries with a better reputation to go to. The fall in the number of foreign workers has hit the rental market.
In all this he feels so alone and abandoned. Evarist Bartolo is frustrated and talking about quitting politics; Muscat has given us the date of his departure from politics to a new career as a Baku-funded tank-thinker; Chris Cardona has handed in his tell-tale parliamentary smartphone, and Konrad Mizzi is enjoying a monastic life somewhere in the UK, fighting a malady that renders his return flight to Malta as medically life-threatening.
It seems that Chris Fearne is the only shoulder he can cry on.