Whatever your political sympathies, appointing Konrad Mizzi to head the Maltese delegation to the OSCE should be considered unethical at best, immoral at worst.
But making taxpayers fork out €80,000 a year to pay him as a consultant just two weeks after he was forced to resign, is beyond the pale.
Let us try to put things in perspective. Dr Mizzi was elected in 2013 as the Labour Party’s star candidate with a pledge to resolve Malta’s energy problem and slash steep tariffs.
The honeymoon didn’t last long.
In 2016 we discovered that Dr Mizzi owned a secret Panama company, Hearnville. He first denied but eventually admitted to having secretly set up the offshore structure. He was eventually stripped of his portfolio but retained in Cabinet, before being promoted once again to minister after the 2017 election.
The suspicion that Dr Mizzi’s structure was set up to receive kickbacks was further strengthened when leaked e-mails revealed that Hearnville was named as one of two companies which were due to receive money from another secret company, 17 Black.
The whiff of impropriety turned to a stench in 2018, when Times of Malta revealed that 17 Black was owned by Yorgen Fenech, a shareholder in the Electrogas consortium which Dr Mizzi had brought to Malta to build and run a new power station.
Meanwhile, Dr Mizzi appeared to be politically bulletproof. As health minister he sold three of Malta’s state hospitals to a company with no medical experience. The deal guaranteed that company, Vitals Global Healthcare, €70 million a year. He was eventually forced to step down in disgrace late last year after his secret business partner Fenech was charged with the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Prime Minister Robert Abela’s decision to keep Dr Mizzi out of his Cabinet should have spelled the end of his time aboard the publicly-funded gravy train.
But instead, on Monday evening we learned Dr Mizzi was being nominated as our representative to the OSCE. Hours later, a leaked contract showed he was also making €80,000 a year, thanks to a contract he signed just two weeks after he resigned as minister, as the Muscat era crumbled.
The rotten deal is further evidence of the sort of revolving doors cronyism that has infected government to its very core.
Dr Mizzi barely had time to lick his political wounds, and already Joseph Muscat was showering him with gold, paying him more than a minister to do less than one.
Was the plum job a condition he set in exchange for resigning as minister?
Was it hush money to ensure he kept quiet about underhand deals during the Muscat administration? Did the Muscat administration feel it could just fork out taxpayers’ money to keep the cabal happy?
Those questions now fall squarely onto Dr Abela’s lap. Yesterday, the government first said that Dr Mizzi would not, after all, serve at the OSCE and later announced that it would be terminating his lucrative consultancy deal.
Both are good decisions, but the public is still owed an explanation.
Let us give Dr Abela the benefit of the doubt and assume he was kept in the dark about the secret deal negotiated just a month before he took office.
The same cannot be said of the OSCE job. It was Dr Abela’s responsibility to ensure that arguably the country’s most notorious MP was kept within an arm’s length of his office and taxpayers’ money.
He has a responsibility to explain why he did not do so, and why he changed his mind so suddenly.
Malta is still traumatised by the violence wrought on its institutions by a ruthless gang. The wounds are still gaping. The last thing the country needs is more officials, both elected and not, acting like pigs at the trough.