Forgive us for being once bitten, twice shy but there is something seriously amiss, judging by past experience, with the appointment of auditors Nexia BT to ‘advise’ on another major infrastructural project.

There are so many things wrong with this formula given the Delimara power station experience that one would have to be a mad man in government or have brass neck of a trumpet to ignore the very glaring problem of public confidence here.

The Delimara power station could easily claim pride of place as the most dubious contract a Maltese government has ever signed.  Malta’s good name has been dragged through the mud and hauled over the hot coals to no end thanks to the clever plans developed by this company for certain people in government.

One would imagine that after all that has come to pass, and after all that may very well still come to pass, that some bright spark in government would have piped up and alerted their superiors to the potential public relations debacle that could ensue with this particular company being involved in another particularly large contract. 

Well perhaps they did and they were shut up real quick or, more likely, perhaps no one even bothered.

Nexia BT is advising government entity Wasteserv on the massive €150 million incineration project.  This is yet another project that will keep delivering, in a big way, for years and decades on end.  The same as with the nation’s power supply, and indeed large chunks of the national healthcare system. 

These great three perpetual and future proof consumables – electricity, health and now waste – have been cornered quite tightly by the government’s business partners and cronies through supposed Public-Private-Partnerships of the kind so favoured by Minister Konrad Mizzi.

Now this particular Mizzi is apparently not the minister spearheading this one.  This one is apparently being led by the environment minister.  But then again, which minister was it that has been given the strange PPP ministerial portfolio 

You guessed it.  Konrad Mizzi is actually the government’s PPP minister.  He is the same minister who spearheaded those other PPPs in the form of the power station and the Vitals Global Healthcare debacles.  Not only were they debacles, but they were also highly suspicious deals that are still the subjects of new and ongoing court cases.

Now it seems that the same people who provided Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff with their overseas, layered financial structures in Panama and New Zealand, purportedly to receive kickbacks from the power station deal, are the same people advising the government on the incinerator.

It is also the same firm that placed their own people on the power station selection committee, according to Malta’s own National Audit Office, allegedly to ensure that the right people got the contract and perhaps to ensure that the right pockets were lined and that the right bank accounts were ‘populated’.

Now we can understand that Nexia BT has not been found criminally culpable, at least not yet, in any of these messes. Their fingerprints, however, are all over the place, even on the doorknob of Mossack & Fonseca’s former offices in Malta, which were rather conveniently run out of the same address.

And again, it is understandable that the company is not entirely excluded from public contracts, but we would very much like to see the competitive process behind the selection of advisors and we would also very much like to see the selection committees appointed before, and find out not years later that the process was rigged as in the Delimara case.