It’s all over social media: Miss Sai Gone. And gone she is, on €13,000 a month and with nothing to show for it. It’s tempting to get stuck on the money and that she’s done no work to justify it – no work at all, in fact, not even enough to justify €13 a month – but that shouldn’t be the main issue here. The real scandal, the true corruption and abuse, is that she is a cabinet minister’s wife.

Even if the job was a real one, and not something invented to accommodate Mrs Konrad Mizzi, it would be classed as corruption. Government minister’s wives are not given top government jobs unless they are in the competitive stream already, and were in that stream before they became government minister’s wives. And even then, they will have to compete for the post along with everyone else and get it on merit. But even in that situation, the sensible and decent thing to do would be to drop out of the race so that the government is not tainted with suspicion of corruption and abuse. Caesar’s wife has to be beyond suspicion, and all that.

But this was so much worse, wasn’t it? Not only was Miss Sai Gone not in the competitive stream and already working for the government to begin with – she came in out of the cold, so to speak, and straight into the job – but the job was created for her specifically and so there was no open call for applications and no interview or selection process. Beyond that, much worse, is the fact that it isn’t even a job, but a fictitious post created as justification for paying the energy minister’s wife a preposterous amount of money on which she could do what she wanted to do and planned to do all along: leave Malta and go back home to China.

For the last 18 months or so, there has been neither sight nor sound of her, except for a brief, cameo appearance once when the Prime Minister and his entourage visited Beijing with some tame journalists in tow and out she popped to speak to them, hankie at the ready. She was totally unprofessional, and instead of speaking about her work – because there was no work to speak about – she sobbed about how unfairly she is being treated by the Maltese media. She did herself no favours.

Her husband behaves as though it is nothing to do with him, as though she is not his wife and the mother of his children, as though he were not the reason she managed to wrangle €13,000, a month off the Maltese public purse, on which to return home to her country. There are many Chinese people living in Malta. They never got a look-in on the same justification that, like Miss Sai Gone, they know the language and culture. There were no interviews because, simply, there is no job. There was only the need to give the energy minister’s wife what she demanded.

Miss Sai Gone left Malta brandishing a contract from Malta Enterprise, with a pseudo-brief to act as that organisation’s consultant on investment in “China” (China is a big place). Now we discover, not through the government or any of its channels, but through the official consular list published on Shanghai’s foreign affairs website, that Malta has a consul in that city and her name is Sai Mizzi.

So she left Malta as Malta Enterprise’s consultant and has since – at some point – morphed into Malta’s consul in Shanghai. Meanwhile, Malta’s Foreign Ministry insists that it had nothing to do with the appointment. This is most odd: consuls are appointed by the Foreign Ministry and not by Malta Enterprise. Their salary and emoluments come out of the foreign ministry’s budget and not that of the Ministry for the Economy (Chris Cardona is the minister), which is responsible for Malta Enterprise.

All this time, the government has been lying to us about the search for an office for Mrs Mizzi/Miss Sai Gone. “You can’t contact her,” was the stupid excuse, “because she doesn’t have an office yet” – as though any journalist or potential investor was thinking of actually taking a plane and going to knock on her office door during office hours, rather than simply ringing her up or emailing her. And as though not having an office is an excuse for not giving somebody your telephone number or email address. Yet Shanghai’s official consular website makes it clear that Sai Mizzi has had an office at least since last September. It is listed as the Malta consular office, and she’s down as the consul. But there’s no telephone number.

I have it on the best authority that the Malta-China Chamber of Commerce has been trying to obtain contact information for Malta Enterprise’s envoy in China for the last 18 months, to no avail. Isn’t it odd? Or maybe it isn’t. By now it’s an open secret that the reason no potential investors are allowed to reach Malta Enterprise’s envoy in China is that Sai Mizzi is not working for Malta Enterprise or even for the Malta government. The Malta government had to find some justification for paying her off, invented a job, and never imagined that fending off potential investors and the media would be a problem.

In fact, it hasn’t been that much of a problem, because we’re all operating on an island where people take it for granted that the public purse will be used to pay off the unhappy wife of a cabinet minister, who wants nothing more than to go back home to China. As long as the cabinet minister doesn’t belong to the Nationalist Party, of course – from Labour we expect the worst and are thrilled to bits and complacent when we get corruption without violence instead of corruption with violence. All Labour has to do is avoid killing people and meddling with the free market, and it’s home and dry. Did I hear anyone say Stockholm Syndrome?

 

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