Malta and the dubious state of its rule of law will once again be one of the main subjects under the European Parliament’s microscope next week as the assembly gathers, once again, to debate the sorry state of affairs in our little country.
This will be the second time the rule of law in Malta is debated by the European Parliament, the first having been held just last June in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations.
It will be the third time that a contentious Maltese issue will be specifically treated by the EP, the first having been the highly controversial Individual Investor Programme (sale of citizenship) which had seen the vast majority of MEPs lined up against Malta.
And Tuesday’s debate and Wednesday’s vote will most likely be a similar case given the support that the resolution on Malta’s rule of law has garnered across the floor of the European Parliament.
Nationalist MEPs and the European People’s Party are once again being accused of a concerted attack against Malta, but in actual fact the attack against Malta started a long time ago – in 2013 to be specific when the new incoming government gave a clean sweep to the public service and replaced the people within the country’s institutions tasked with safeguarding that rule of law with cronies and yes men.
No, this is not an attack against Malta. It is an attack against those who have undermined the country’s rule of law. It is an attack against police commissioners who have ignored damning reports against people in the highest echelons of power, and it is a demand for the current police commissioner to investigate the politically exposed people mentioned in the Panama Papers and the leaked Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit reports.
It is an attack against those who have leveraged their political power for nefarious ends and it is an attack against the toothless institutions who fiddle while Valletta burns, and by ‘fiddled’ we do not mean the playing of instruments.
The situation, as Daphne Caruana Galizia put it in her last written words, is desperate. But anyone hoping for any sort of divine European intervention on the matter may have fallen victim to wishful thinking.
The resolution tabled on Malta’s rule of law is hard-hitting and quite specific, as opposed to the contents of the last debate on Malta’s rule of law. But it will not be binding. It could very well be humiliating for the country to be chastised by the European Parliament but at the end of the day it remains to be seen what kind of effective rule of law could actually be enforced in a country that will argue its platitudes until it is blue in the face.
And in the wake of next week’s debate and vote, rest assured that the accusations, and sparks, will fly. In fact, they already are flying but much more should be expected in the wake of next week’s parliamentary events.
The last time this happened, last June, the debate had been watered down to such an extent that much of what was said by MEPs, we are sorry to say, was irrelevant. They used much of that debate to lash out at Malta and to continuously call the country a tax haven given its low and advantageous corporate tax rates – approved and endorsed by both the EU and the OECD.
MEPs must stick to the issue at hand if they are to do justice to a truly rotten situation in one of the fellow member states. In fact, the EP’s PANA Committee just this week reported that the country taxation system was complaint with OECD standards.
The last time around, the Maltese MEPs who spoke out against the way in which the government has dealt with, or rather not dealt with, the fallout from the Panama Papers and the reports leaked from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit. Even the chairman of the European Parliament’s PANA Committee got a great deal of gratuitous and unwarranted abuse from Maltese internet trolls who have serious problems seeing past their own noses.
The Maltese MEPs who spoke out against this state of affairs were dubbed traitors across several sections of the Maltese cybersphere by members of the general public, people in positions of authority and even by aspiring politicians.
But those Maltese MEPs who spoke out during the debate, who had spoken out before and who are still speaking out are anything but traitors. They are, in actual fact, patriots. They may have a political stripe that differs from that of the government, but the fact of the matter is that they have subjected themselves, and will undoubtedly continue to subject themselves, to such criticism for love of their country, for its rule of law and in the name of its aspirations for truly good governance of the nation.
To cry foul for having dared to expose the country’s dirty laundry against such a backdrop is absolute rubbish. But that is exactly what is being done already. Those who would seek to stifle those who dare to speak up for the common good of the country by using intimidation and threats have no place in such a democracy.
Let us hope it does not come down to this once again next week.