When Joseph Muscat was leader of the Opposition, he wound people up and stirred the pot of public dissatisfaction by making out that there was some kind of clique – and more to the point, an evil clique – who were living high on the hog and taking and getting things that were not theirs to take and get simply because they were cronies and favourites and in a position to do so.
It was quite obvious to me at the time that Muscat and his people spoke that way not because they were shocked at any the thought of anybody taking anything. We look back now, as we swim through a mire of daily reports on corruption and abuse, and wonder what all the fuss was about then. No, I thought as I listened to them rant and rave to the point of apoplexy, they’re not shocked. They’re visibly irritated, because if they were in power their entire faces would be sunk into the trough and, because they assume that everyone else has their mentality, they think that of course others have been troughing it up and now it’s not fair because it’s their turn at the swill and they’re so fed-up waiting that they’re going to eat through the gates.
The subtext to the Labour Party’s general election mantra ‘Malta Taghna Lkoll’ was not meritocracy but ‘Butt out of the way because we want some too.’
Two years in, and the looting, grabbing and hoovering up of public goods and public money shows no sign of abatement. In fact, it’s getting worse as they get more and more confident. Instead of putting their hands in the public till, bringing out wads of cash and handing them directly to their cronies, Joseph and his men are creating fictitious roles for them, giving these roles a silly and pointless name – the Maltese ministerial equivalent of Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen – and attaching to them a large salary and plenty of perks and privileges, with no particular work required in return, nor even – as in Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s and Franco Debono’s case – attendance at the office. Whenever I go into Valletta I see, without fail, Franco Debono wandering around South Street or Republic Street, or roaming without purpose in the Courts of Justice wearing his Criminal Lawyer hat, all on his salary of many thousands, with a car and chauffeur as President of the Law Commission. And Pullicino Orlando is usually either on the Labour Party’s television station talking about dental work, or in his dental clinic, on a salary much larger than Debono’s, as chairman of the Science Council, and also with a full-time chauffeur who is a soldier on secondment from the Armed Forces of Malta.
Those are the two most prominent free-loaders, but there are literally legions of individuals who are unknown to the electorate but who have been put on the public payroll because they are cronies or party favourites. Sometimes, something will happen to put them firmly in the spotlight, as when 23-year-old Clint Scerri was outed as the King of Lands (Il-Kink tal-Lents) in Michael Falzon’s private secretariat. The man is barely literate or articulate in Maltese, and cannot speak or write English to save his life, and yet there he is. The main thing is that he is a party diehard. And then, because Clint Scerri was in the news, we found out that his brother, his mother and his Russian wife had also been put on the state payroll. That is just one of the cosy set-ups we have discovered as a by-product of the Marco Gaffarena scandal. Heaven alone knows how many others there are. I’ll bet that at this stage even the government itself has lost track.
Marco Gaffarena’s property deals are another symptom of the all-you-can-eat buffet mentality. Michael Falzon was right when he said that the only reason it made the news is because of Gaffarena’s surname. He was right not because the deal was correct and proper, but because there are so many more of these deals going on and many of them are slipping through the press-net because their names don’t ring a bell and connections are not being made. But lawyers tell me that there is practically a raid on the Government Property Division, with friends and cronies trawling through the portfolio of publicly-owned property to see what they fancy.
There’s been the Café Premier and Australia Hall, but the true centre-piece of Joseph’s all-you-can-eat buffet is the €88 million government guarantee for a private company’s €101 million loan from the Bank of Valletta. Without the government guarantee, the bank won’t have given Electrogas Malta Ltd that loan and Joseph won’t have got his power station. So Joseph lifted the lid on the great, big chafing-dish at the centre of his buffet table and fed Electrogas a great, big €88 million to guarantee their bank loan but more importantly, to guarantee his political survival until the next general election.
We have another three years of watching them all eat, eat and eat some more until they feel sick. It’s a truly disgusting sight.
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