Current political controversies – not to use the word “scandals” – have highlighted the severe conflict of interest faced by members of parliament who also have professional practices. Because Malta’s MPs are so poorly paid – why not have far fewer, and pay them more? – that they have to keep their day jobs. This makes them part-time members of parliament, and full-time architects, lawyers, doctors or notaries. There is a preponderance of these professions on our parliamentary benches for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that people who run their own professional offices are in a far better position to take time off to campaign, to pay attention to those who might vote for them, and even to read the odd White Paper, though you would be surprised to learn how many of them hardly know what’s going on in parliamentary debates.
They are at liberty to turn their offices into constituency surgeries, too. People who are full-time employees cannot do any of this, and so our parliamentary benches, which are supposed to be representative of the people, are no more that than the Council of Government in the 19th century.
Quite apart from the fact that it is undesirable in itself to have far too many of one kind of person in parliament, and on both sides of the house too, the kind of person that they are is also creating some very unsavoury situations. Jesmond Buhagiar – I choose the name at random – remains Jesmond Buhagiar, whether he is sitting in parliament, taking a professional brief from a client in his office, or chatting to his wife across the kitchen table. No distinctions may be drawn between Jesmond Buhagiar the MP, Jesmond Buhagiar the lawyer, and Jesmond Buhagiar the spouse. Yet for some strange reason, and I suspect that this reason has been put about by the MP-professionals themselves, those distinctions are made routinely and even taken for granted. I have given up arguing with people who should know better, but don’t, that Jesmond Buhagiar can’t take off his MP’s hat when he leaves parliament for the morning, then walks to the office where he puts on his lawyer’s hat.
Switching hats belongs to the realms of Edward de Bono and his motivational talks. In real life, we wear the same hat all the time: the hat with our name on it. Even when Jesmond Buhagiar is sitting in his professional office talking to clients of his legal practice, he remains an MP and has to act accordingly. He cannot put aside his role as MP in order to do something as a lawyer that conflicts with that role. The fact that he is an MP is paramount, and responsibilities towards that status must come before responsibilities towards the clients of his profession.
Why is this so hard to understand? I imagine that it is because Maltese social culture is one in which earning your loaf because il-familja dejjem trid comes before everything else, and is used to justify all kinds of things which would be otherwise unjustifiable. Many, if not most, of the people who become MPs want to have their cake and eat it. They want the kudos of being a politician, but they also want the money that comes from keeping all the balls up in the air at their professional practice, or whatever passes for their day job.
It’s fine for them to have a day job. What isn’t fine is having a day job that puts them in a position of conflict of interest – not because of the conflict of interest itself, but because few of them seem able to resist and to do the correct thing by recommending another professional from a different office to a particular client, or by refusing a particular job. They think they can switch roles and hats, and do something for a client of their professional office that might compromise them and their party, and irritate the electorate, but only if they are found out.
Criminal lawyers are in the worst position of all, and the reasons for that should be quite obvious and I don’t want to go into them here. Suffice it to say that, as a general rule, most of their clients are convicts and criminals, though some are wrongly accused. Yes, those clients have a right to a lawyer – but there are plenty of criminal lawyers around who are not MPs. The electorate also has a right: to MPs who are not taking briefs from drug traffickers, paedophiles, murderers or wife-beaters. Again, the reason for this should be obvious, but I remain astonished that there are people about who don’t quite get it. I’ll give just one example. Both the government and the opposition say that they are committed to pursuing drug-dealers. Yet both the government and the opposition have, on their parliamentary benches, criminal lawyers who are in a position to take briefs from drug-dealers, and who sometimes do. While the government tries – through the enactment of various laws and the agency of the police force – to weed out drug-dealers and lock them up, government MPs who are criminal lawyers are free to defend drug dealers in court and to try to prevent them from being sent to prison for the maximum period, or at all. The drug-dealer is paying them to keep him out of prison, while the state – through their MP’s salary – is paying them to fight the drug problem. In that very straightforward conflict of interest, the client wins and the electorate loses. The opposition is in precisely the same position, and so cannot attack the government on this one. We are looking here at a closed shop of sorts. The ministerial cabinet is dominated by lawyers, and the parliamentary benches on both sides of the house are teeming with them. Can we expect lawyers to make rules that act against the narrow interests of themselves or their colleagues? Of course, we can’t.
There are some real life examples from the ongoing presidential pardon debacle. The Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi acted on behalf of one of the ex-driving examiners who were convicted for taking bribes. The correct thing for him to do in that situation would have been to tell his client: “I’m sorry, but I can’t take this brief. I am a government MP, and it puts me in a very awkward position. It would compromise me and create difficulty for the government. It would look bad with the electorate, and rightly so. May I recommend Dr X from the Muscat Jones Zammit legal office? She should be able to help you.” Not only did Dr Azzopardi fail to do this, but he went one step further, and channelled to the government his client’s request for the implementation of the presidential prerogative of mercy.
When the scandal broke, government apologists argued that Dr Azzopardi had been acting in his role as a lawyer, and not as a government MP. It was a weak piece of sophistry, and not an artful one. The two roles are not separate and distinct. We are speaking here of one man called Jason Azzopardi, a lawyer who is also an MP. Jason Azzopardi the MP and Jason Azzopardi the lawyer are one and the same person. If he were to be prosecuted for mugging an old lady for her handbag (a most unlikely scenario, but arguments are tested by taking them to the extreme), then he would be unable to argue in court that it was Jason the lawyer who mugged her, and not Jason the MP.
And here is where the opposition is compromised, in the same way that the government is compromised, by the actions of some of the lawyers on its benches. Alfred Sant is in an extremely weak position when he criticises the actions of Jason Azzopardi and of minister Jesmond Mugliett, because his own people are busy knocking at the government’s door for presidential pardons for their convicted clients. The newspaper Malta Today called all the criminal lawyers on the opposition benches – a full eight of them – and asked them straight off whether they had asked for presidential pardons for their clients. Six of them said yes, one didn’t answer his phone, and Joe Brincat said no. Somehow, I imagined that would be the case, because it would be odd indeed if a man who doesn’t eat meat for reasons of principle were to see nothing wrong in pestering the government to have one of his convicts pardoned. So what we are seeing here is a certain degree of hypocrisy: Alfred the pot insulting Lawrence the kettle.
Ah, but there’s even more. The shadow minister for roads, who is an architect, has tested the argument that MP-professionals can wear their two hats separately, and found it wanting. To prove that a certain official of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority was taking bribes, Mr Buhagiar revealed in parliament documentation that showed how this individual took bribes from one of the clients of his architecture practice.
There was just one problem: he had blacked out the names of his client and of the Mepa official. When asked to reveal these names, he cited professional secrecy.
This was ludicrous, and surely Mr Buhagiar could have predicted the reaction. Or did he imagine that he could put on his MP’s hat to place the documentation on the table of the house, then whip it off again and replace it with his architect’s hat – even while he was standing in parliament – to cite professional secrecy?
This was a clear and incontrovertible case of conflict of interest. Mr Buhagiar’s duty as an MP – to reveal apparent corruption at the planning authority – was in direct conflict with his duty towards his client who, it should be said, is corrupt too. Those who pay bribes are as corrupt as those who take them, but it is convenient for us to overlook this, isn’t it? I get the feeling that, to make matters worse, it was not a feeling of duty towards the electorate that gave Mr Buhagiar the urge to reveal the corruption in this typically Maltese “sitting on the fence” way. It was his desire to put another nail in the government’s coffin. In the end, the Mepa chairman and the police pursued the investigation without Mr Buhagiar’s assistance, and found out who it was.
And here I must ask a crucial question: Charles Buhagiar behaved like this when he was a mere MP. What would he do if his client were to come to his architectural practice with the same news of having bribed a Mepa official, when he is Minister of Roads? Keep the information secret from Prime Minister Sant, on the grounds of professional secrecy?
When the disillusioned dismiss the political class as a ragbag of fools and charlatans, we should not be surprised or angry. They have given themselves their own bad name.
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