The one aspect of the Neville Gafa scandal we should all take for granted is that this man was perfectly comfortable doing what he did – and before he protests his innocence, those Viber messages didn’t come out of nowhere – and that he is unlikely to have betrayed the trust of those who installed him in their private secretariats as precisely that: a trusted person.

Think about it. One minute Gafa is a shop assistant in Valletta, standing behind the counter and earning a living wage. Then come the revolution, March 2013, he is elevated to the Prime Minister’s private secretariat, placed on the state payroll as a political appointee and trusted person, answering to Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. And when Godfrey Farrugia is unceremoniously sacked from his position as Health Minister, and Konrad Mizzi – who is Energy Minister already – is made Health Minister too (and now we know it’s because lucrative hospital privatisation contracts were coming their way), Neville Gafa was installed in the Health Ministry as “the Prime Minister’s Office representative”. The fact that Gafa was first handpicked from his shop assistant job, then moved around the network at the very top – the Joseph Muscat/Konrad Mizzi/Keith Schembri cabal – tells us rather a lot. It tells us that Gafa has their intimate confidence.

When you are in that position, the likelihood is that you’re not betraying your protectors when, within weeks of being installed by them in the Health Ministry, you begin working on how to turn a legitimate medical visa system into a scam operation. From where I’m sitting, it looks more like you’re working with them on it, because you wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise and survive, and also because it looks like it’s the sole reason you were put there in the first place. The fact that Gafa hasn’t been fired, but simply moved along within the Health Ministry when a couple of Libyan men began to get angry and make very loud noises about being cheated, only serves to make this more blindingly obvious. If Gafa were not protected by the Muscat/Mizzi/Schembri cabal, he would have been kicked out within minutes. He is not a civil servant, but a political appointee, so he can be given 10 minutes to clear his desk. The Public Service Commission and all those rules don’t come into it.

Gafa is also extremely defiant and arrogant on Facebook, insulting and denigrating those who criticise him and being extremely rude about journalists who are chasing him about this story. If he were not part of the cabal, and have their full confidence and protection, he would not be doing this. He would be anxious about the accusations against him, upset at the story if it were not true, fearful for his position. The normal reaction of a public officer, especially if he is a political appointee, who is accused of such grave corruption, is to be pole-axed with worry, whether the accusations are true or not. He will be especially concerned about his superiors’ fury, and anxious not to be the cause of further upset. He will know that being cocky and insulting on Facebook will only serve to make his superiors even angrier, that they will think less of him. Even very dim-witted people like Neville Gafa instinctively understand this. Nobody is that stupid. So it follows, to my mind (and probably to the mind of any sensible person), that Gafa is behaving this way because he knows he can.

Let’s put it this way. This government will sell anything that others will buy, including citizenship and passports. It is even selling residence visas in Shanghai – there was a big press conference, featuring Mrs Konrad Mizzi, some months ago – in return for a “donation (yes, that’s what they called it) to Identity Malta. So it should be obvious that the government will have no barriers of conscience or ethics about selling something else that others will buy: visas for hospital treatment, to desperate Libyans. And once you’re in the market for that anyway, why not sell those medical visas to Libyans who don’t need medical treatment, but who would be blocked for standard visas?

The only problem here is that the cynical, amorally pragmatic Maltese who will sell anything as long as it’s legal – like citizenship – and sometimes even if it’s not, will probably bring out a powerful torch to hunt down their elusive conscience if the government proposes selling medical visas. I rather suspect that’s exactly where the stooge Neville Gafa came in, to sell beneath the table something that couldn’t be sold over the table – until somebody squealed and the press got onto it.

 

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