Transparency International has published its annual Corruption Perception Index, giving Malta a score of 55% and a ranking of 43 among 173 countries. A score of 100% means no corruption and of 0% means total corruption - so that means Malta hasn't done well at all at 55%. It never did spectacularly well, but the worrying thing is that it has dropped a percentage point since last year and another percentage point the year before that. This means that the Labour Party, which was elected to power on the strength of promises to eradicate corruption, is perceived to have done the opposite. Since March 2013, Malta has fallen by two percentage points on Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index.
The operative word here is perception. Transparency International has no means of measuring real and actual corruption. Its index is based on how people in the country see the state of play where corruption is concerned, and though that perception is largely intuitive, when you look at the rankings for those 173 countries, you can see that it is really quite accurate in relative terms. Denmark comes up top of the rankings with a score of 92% and North Korea comes bottommost with a score of just 8%. Italy, which is one of the most corrupt states in Europe, ranks 69th - a full 26 places below Malta, with a score of just 43%.
It would be counter-productive to compare ourselves to our neighbours and say, oh well, we are doing so much better than they are. How defeatist do you have to be to compare yourself to Mafia territory? We should compare ourselves instead to the Scandinavian states at the top of the list and tell ourselves how far we still have to go. We should also be worried that Malta has fallen a percentage point a year since Labour got into government, when its promise to us was that it would do the opposite.
The government's decisions, choices and actions over the last two years have manifestly contributed to the perception among the electorate that corruption has increased. Now this perception is not only my view as a columnist; it is actually backed up here by Transparency International. And it is likely that by next year Malta will have fallen another percentage point when perception is assessed that factors in recent events: the Manuel Mallia debacle, which resurrected anew his many other crimes against administrative propriety, the non-transparent manner in which the government signed yet another not-quite-a-contract with Shanghai Electric Power, and the subterfuge with which the prime minister visited Baku in Azerbaijan (Transparency International Corruption Perception Index score 29%; ranking 126), which put the press in Malta in the ridiculous position of having to scour Azerbaijani news portals for information about what our own prime minister was getting up to. It was through photographs published by the Azerbaijan state news agency that we in Malta discovered that our prime minister's negotiating team was composed of himself, his head of secretariat, his spokesman and the energy minister. It did not include specialist technocrats, top civil servants or diplomats. Those photographs disturbed people - they were the pictures that spoke a thousand words.
What are people supposed to think when top-ranking police officers, who were investigating the Trafigura bribery case, said before the Public Accounts Committee that they would have charged all the Farrugia brothers had they not been removed from the case? Those investigators were removed from the case when Manuel Mallia was made Police Minister. Mallia was the Farrugia brothers' lawyer right up until the moment he was made a minister. In the general election campaign, he used this case not only to his party's political advantage but also to his clients' advantage in their case against their other brother George. As long as he remained Police Minister, his (ex) clients were not charged.
Now Mallia has been replaced as Police Minister, his cousin Ray Zammit is no longer acting Police Commissioner but deputy commissioner, and one of the first things the new Police Commissioner has said is that the Farrugia brothers are going to be prosecuted. Isn't it obvious people will conclude that the only reason why they haven't been charged in almost two years is that they had the protection of their (ex) lawyer the Police Minister and his cousin the acting Police Commissioner? Whether that is a fact or not is beside the point. It is the perception that counts, and Transparency International's index is based on perception. It is because of matters such as this that Malta has slipped down in the rankings. All we need to be told now, to compound the situation, is that Mallia has gone back to being the Farrugia brothers' lawyer, given that he is now an ordinary backbencher and free to practise law.