We are about to see illustrated the reason why somebody as politically committed and with the personality of Wenzu Mintoff should not have been made a judge. The Ombudsman has long been involved in a dispute with the Police Minister – it started when Manuel Mallia was the incumbent – about who should decide cases of injustice in army promotions. Given that no consensus was reached even though Manuel Mallia has left the post and been replaced by the supposedly more amenable Carmelo Abela, the Ombudsman has taken the matter to court. And the matter will be decided, we heard yesterday, by Judge Wenzu Mintoff.
Nothing wrong there, some have said. As a judge, he is bound over to be impartial. But that isn’t the issue at all. The issue is public perception and the imperative that justice must be seen to be done and seen to be impartial. As long as it is Wenzu Mintoff who is deciding on a case like this, there will always be doubts, no matter how objective and impartial he struggles to be. Whatever his decision, there will be those who say it was motivated by the desire to accommodate the Labour Party he fought so hard to bring to power, and in return was appointed to the bench – or that it was motivated by the desire to prove the point that he does not allow political obsession to shape his judgement. He can’t win and public trust in his decisions is inevitably going to be shaky.
The decent thing
Michael Falzon apologised late yesterday afternoon for letting the side down so badly. “I acknowledge that although my fiscal position has long ago been regularised, this is not sufficient for a politically active person,” he wrote, in a statement for public release. “I recognise that I ought to have repatriated the funds on the first possible occasion after the 1987 election, and that I ought to have included the said funds in my ministerial declaration of assets. As a result of these omissions, I have failed my prime minister, my parliamentary colleagues and the electorate who had given me their trust by voting for me. In view of this, I unconditionally apologise for my failures.”
This was the civilised thing to do in the circumstances, and Mr Falzon must have realised that the general feeling in his regard, at least among those who know him and regard him favourably, is one of great disappointment. There is a little question mark still hanging over what he means by “should have repatriated the funds on the first possible occasion after the 1987 election”. I take it to mean that he now thinks he should have used the first Nationalist government amnesty to come clean to his prime minister and cabinet and sort out his situation (which would have meant losing his cabinet position).
This wouldn’t have been the ideal – that ideal would have been not to stand for election in the first place with that kind of thing hanging over him, but failing that, then not to accept a cabinet position. After all, what would he have done if there had been no government amnesty? But let’s meet halfway on that – I acknowledge that he has done the decent thing here. He has also shown up the prime minister, the Labour Party and government apparatchiks, and the incumbents at the Malta Today stables. With their tweets in his defence, they showed that they did not understand that this is fundamentally an issue of betrayal of trust. We don’t expect Joseph Muscat to understand something like this – he has neither the background nor the personality to make any such understanding possible. But Michael Falzon understood it well, and his conscience has obviously been troubling him for the last three days, prompting this public apology.
Will Ninu Zammit do the same? I doubt it, though you never know how these situations will pan out. The fact remains that he didn’t even have the common decency to say how much money he hid from his prime minister for the 20 years he was in cabinet, and how much he hid from the electorate for the three decades or so that he was in parliament.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com