John Dalli is hogging the media again, like a bad dream. It makes you wonder what sort of place you are living in, when somebody like that not only survives one storm and accusation after another, but is shoved back into our faces again by a prime minister who champions him personally to the point where he has foisted him onto one of his cabinet ministers. And there’s trouble brewing there in paradise as Health Minister Godfrey Farrugia is more and more visibly irritated by having his turf trampled all over by Malta’s best-known charity worker.
This is a sacked EU Commissioner, still under fresh investigation by the EU Commission for the questionable flying visit he made to the Bahamas while he was supposed to be on EU Council business. This is the man whose prosecution was only stopped by removing the police commissioner and replacing him with somebody prepared to say that there is no case against Dalli. And yet here he is, laying down the law on what should be done at the general hospital, cancelling €25 million tenders that have been three years in preparation and with some bids already prepared and ordering that the job be given to a two-man operation which, we now discover, is owned by Mark Sammut, who was registered as EU Commissioner Dalli’s ‘special adviser’ in Brussels last year. The company, Cursor Ltd, is registered on the MFSA website to a hotel room in Bugibba.
The prime minister tells us that Dalli is a consultant, that he has no contract and that he isn’t paid. And that begs the question as to under which authority he is handing out contracts when he does not even have a contract with the government himself. His daughter who works with him out of an office at the general hospital is not paid either. They clearly believe in the maxim that charity begins at home, in this case Malta, even if they carry it all the way to the Caribbean at times.
But this is not the behaviour of a consultant, is it? Consultants are backroom boys and you never see their faces or barely even know their names. Yet Dalli, fully recovered from the psycho-social condition which rendered him unable to get on a plane to Malta until March this year, is giving interviews enthusiastically now, in exactly the same way he used to do when he was a cabinet minister. He’s not a consultant to the health minister or even to the prime minister. He’s the new CEO at the general hospital, calling the shots. That is not the way a consultant behaves.
Consultants give advice. They submit reports, and then it is up to the real boss to decide what to do. But Dalli has shoved the real boss, Health Minister Godfrey Farrugia, right off the stage. There was a discussion programme on television in which Dalli sat there with Farrugia, not as the minister’s consultant and adviser, who shouldn’t have been there anyway, and not even as his equal. He sat there as somebody who knows for a fact that he has the upper hand over the minister, because he has the upper hand over the prime minister, for reasons that remain unclear.
Yes, Dalli is behaving as though he is the health minister, the hospital CEO and the prime minister’s boss, all rolled into one. It’s a fetid kettle of fish.
In this context it has now become obvious why John Dalli is so determined that Godfrey Farrugia should not have an office directly inside the hospital. It is not the reason you would expect: that the health minister shouldn’t be inside the hospital because that’s not the place for him. That is the reason Dalli gave, but one is now left with the impression that he just wants Farrugia out of his hair and out of the way, to consolidate his new mini-kingdom called Mother of God. Many people now have the strangest feeling that there is so much more to come yet.
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