The main protagonists, the government at large and its social media trolls, are working hard to sell everyone the line that the scathing report published on Thursday evening by the European Parliament was no more than a conspiracy drummed up by the Opposition and the country’s ‘hostile’ media to tarnish the government’s reputation, which has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by a bunch of gullible MEPs.
This could not be any further from the truth. The truth of the matter is that the government’s reputation was tarnished the moment Malta and the rest of the world came to know that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and his star minister had set up secret and suspicious companies in Panama and accompanying trusts in New Zealand upon being elected to office.
It was from that moment on that the eyes of the world were diverted to miniscule Malta and its government. That reputation was tarnished further when the Prime Minister abjectly failed to take any sort of action against the offending pair. And it was tarnished further still when one of the leading critics of those financial misadventures, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was assassinated.
The world’s eyes are indeed on Malta, and so are the eyes of Europe’s lawmakers. But why all this interest in Malta, some may be asking. The answer to that lies in the central concept that what happens in one member state happens in all member states, that the problems in one member state are problems for all member states.
That is why they are concerned.
They are concerned that the government’s Individual Investor Programme has opened the floodgates for persons unknown to become European citizens and to move and settle freely within the bloc. They are of the opinion that the programme ‘foments corruption and imports organised crime and money laundering into the Union’.
This is an issue of pan-European concern.
They are concerned that the government is passively or actively allowing money to be laundered into Europe and they are concerned that a European government is turning a blind eye toward corruption within their ranks, and the effect that may have around the EU’s various negotiating tables.
Such inspection of the situation in Malta is not the result of rabblerousing opposition party MEPs or the non-compliant media; it is the result of the government’s dubious application of the rule of law in Malta.
They are concerned that entities under these microscopes are threatening to silence a European nation’s media at large with the threat of financially crippling SLAPP lawsuits.
They are concerned that the problem with the rule of law in Malta is down to the government’s rampant abuse of its power — from failing to prosecute or even investigate the multiple misdeeds perpetrated by members of the government, to castrating the institutions that are meant to protect citizens’ rights and uphold the laws of the land, and to the way in which basic democratic principles are ignored left right and centre.
The MEPs on the European Parliament’s PANA and Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committees that published this week’s damning report, based on a fact-finding mission to Malta a month and a half ago, are, quite frankly, doing their job.
Whatever the government apologists and trolls may regurgitate, these people who have come down so forcefully on the government are not controlled by the local media, by one political party or another.
This is no Maltese home grown conspiracy, the government has not fallen victim to vicious lies being spread in its regard. What is happening is the result of Malta being part of the European Union and all that comes with it – the rules and the regulations – for better or for worse.