At times, we utterly despair. In the face of biggest government-linked scandal and weighty accusations of state graft to have possibly ever rocked the country, a pair of opposition MPs go, begging bowl in hand, to the alleged perpetrator of the scam to ask for a conference room for a party event.

This would be the stuff of great political satire were it not such a serious national problem.   An opposition leader cries foul at corruption of the highest order, and his underlings go asking for alms.

Apparently, and if we have got this right from The Times’ report of last Sunday, the Opposition was in need of a venue for a political activity, so it went and approached a number of hotels to ‘sponsor’ a conference room. Two of the Opposition leader’s closest people, MPs Kristy Debono and Hermann Schiavone, set about making appointments at venues in St Julian’s and Swieqi.

One of those appointments was, understandably, at the Hilton, of the country’s leading hotels. So far, so good, and there is not even a need to go into the fact that the Tumas Group owns both the Hilton as well as a major stake in the ill-begotten Delimara power station project, which has been at the centre of bribery, corruption and graft accusations and revelations.

The two MPs both claim something to the vague effect of having been misled; that neither of them had actually set the meeting with the Tumas Group’s — and 17 Black’s —  Yorgen Fenech, and that they had simply been referred to the man by another of the company’s directors.

Now this is where so far was not so good. The moment Debono and Schiavone heard the name Yorgen Fenech crop up in any relation to anything the Opposition was doing, the pair of MPs should have turned tail and evacuated immediately if they knew what was good for them, their party and, indeed, the country.

But, instead, as Debono said in her apology for her actions — no such apology, we note, was forthcoming from Schiavone — they went ahead and met Fenech “in broad daylight and at his official office.”

It matters little where and when they met. What matters is that the pair took the completely misguided and ill-judged decision to meet the person — their own leader’s bête noire.

How are we to know with complete certainty that there wasn’t another deal on the table, maybe a piping down of 17 black media exposure? While we doubt that this was the case, we could not blame people for thinking otherwise. 

And that is exactly why such things are not done.

In what dimension did these two MPs think it would have been acceptable to even use the conference room considering the situation? And while we are at it, why is the Nationalist Party even going around asking for conference rooms when it has its own enormous headquarters, the AZAD premises and who knows how many rooms in how many party clubs.

Did they really have to go to Yorgen Fenech of all people? And had the actual event come to pass (it didn’t), would the Opposition leader have even known of the involvement of this particular Fenech in the party’s do?

This whole business is so typical of the blurring of the lines from which we suffer so badly in this country. And it does good governance very little good to think that the Opposition blurs the lines as much as the government of the day does.

And that brings us to another point, which is: Why ask for a ‘sponsorship’ from a commercial enterprise in the first place when you are a political party? Political parties should pay for their events, and not ask for favours, or else use their own premises.

The last thing we need in this country is more politicians and political parties owing favours to big business. Have we not seen enough of that kind of thing?

This comes after the leader himself has been fighting tooth and nail against corruption, and after he had personally taken such exception to having once been remotely linked, through several degrees of separation, to a company that helped finance a bond issue linked to Electrogas several years back.

This decision was a most hideous faux pas on the part of the MPs or on the part of the party and on anyone else who may have had an inkling of the misguided decision to ask Electrogas’ Yorgen Fenech, of all people, for favours.

Those are favours the Opposition cannot afford to owe. And if this was merely an error of judgement, just imagine the errors in government that could be committed if such behaviour and poor decision-making skills go unaddressed.