In the outcry about the Cafe Premier deal with the government, we have tended to put too much focus on majority shareholder, Mario George Camilleri, as the baddie who brokered the deal. But the real baddie in this story is the one who made the deal possible, who opened his arms to it and welcomed it when it was not his own money he was spending: the prime minister.
Joseph Muscat has told the press that he “made a mistake” because he “hurried to find a solution” to the situation. He misses the point, perhaps deliberately, that the problem was not his but Cities Entertainment’s, and the prime minister is not there to solve the problems of individuals but to run the country properly, safeguarding its assets.
One of the least convincing aspects of the situation is that Muscat was fresh in to the job of prime minister. You’d think that having been there for such a month or so, he would have more pressing priorities than sorting out Mario George Camilleri’s business problems. Not that Camilleri needs any help in sorting them out. Having drained the company dry and run up four million euros in debt, he hit on a strategy of targeting first one party in government (with absolutely no luck) and then the party he saw clearly would be in government (with rather more luck).
That sorted, he closed down the Cafe Premier business on election-day. Clearly, there was no need to carry on. You would think he’d have been a little more tactful about it – waited until the end of the month, perhaps – but he was a man in a hurry to whom, quite obviously, a pre-electoral commitment had been given. He would not have done it otherwise. The question now is exactly who gave him that commitment and how he got it, but given that everyone is denying everything, all we can do is reach our own private conclusions.
“Everybody is talking about me as though I’m some kind of criminal,” Camilleri told the newspapers. Not quite – he’s just experienced being in the limelight for the wrong reasons for the first time, and he doesn’t like it. People like him are able to operate only if they stay well under the radar and they absolutely detest this kind of publicity, which leads to scrutiny of their business operations and general affairs.
They benefit, additionally, from having one of the most ordinary and unremarkable names in the country, and this further helps them to stay invisible except to those who count, those who they court. Let’s face it – who had heard of Mario George Camilleri, with his big (by Maltese standards) estate in Rabat and his flaunted millions, before the National Audit Office report hit the news? Before that, though the story was in the news already, nobody seemed motivated to or interested in working out who and what he is. Now it turns out that while this particular one of his businesses was technically bankrupt, he and his other businesses most certainly are not.
He could easily have paid off Cities Entertainment’s debts – that is, if his boasting and showing off are anything to go by, and unless this is yet another case of ‘all fur coat and no knickers – but he didn’t. He struck a deal with the prime minister (some think he struck a deal with the Opposition leader, at the time) and wriggled out of it with his fortune intact.
Why don’t people like this? Simple – it’s not only the reality of four and a half million euros of public money going down the plug-hole to pay the business debts of a courtier that bothers them. It’s the thought of courtiers cosying up to the prime minister (using Gmail) to strike their suspect deals on a one-to-one basis, without cabinet scrutiny and out of sight of the public gaze. If somebody had not tipped off the press, and if the ensuing fuss had not led to an investigation by the National Audit Office, the chummy deal between the prime minister and Mario George Camilleri, who paid himself a general brokerage fee, would have remained unknown to the public and, from we hear now, even to the prime minister’s cabinet colleagues. Trust, after all, is just another word.
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