The public auction of 59 BMWs, used by Commonwealth Heads of Government during their recent Malta meeting, has given rise to adverse comment.

No one complained about the fact that the “used” cars were disposed off by auction, and much less about the fact that part of the proceeds were earmarked in advance to go to a worthy cause.

The complaint was related to the iniquity of the terms of sale. The luxurious cars were sold free of road tax, which is massive (so long as they are not disposed of within seven years), and which made them an attractive once-in-a-lifetime bargain.

The auction went like a bomb, taking the organisers, and the BMW Malta managing director, by surprise. The

latter reportedly stated that they had expected to sell about l5 cars – and that arrangements had been made to ship any unsold cars back to the United Kingdom.

Taken by storm

The auction site was taken by storm and, in less than three hours, each and every car had been snapped up, at well over the asking price, realising Lm2 million of sales, of which Lm600,000 will go to L-Istrina!

Press reports indicated that some familiar faces from industry were at the auction. This was the day for the ostentatious and the capricious with money to flaunt.

People with honest, hard-earned money have a right to flaunt it, even if ostentation may be distasteful to the average well-bred citizen.

What is at once objectionable, and positively reprehensible, is the decision to exempt the conference cars from road tax. This denies the cash-strapped Exchequer of a sizable tax-take.

Rules of equity

At best, it is insensitive. At worst, it is offensive by Christian standards and unjust by the rules of equity.

It has been estimated that, in one morning, some Lm1 million have been waived by the government in registration tax and VAT. Irrespective of whether this estimate is, or is not inflated, the fact remains that a substantial amount of public funds has been unaccountably written off by a government, which, for years, has been unable to meet the prime needs of all patients with kidney complaints – to the point that public spirited volunteers take annual charity trips by bicycle to raise money for the purchase of kidney machines, which they donate to government hospitals.

Others have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for patients in need of help not readily available from public funds.

Inexplicable decision

It would have made much more sense if the tax concession on this unique occasion was made to the advantage of the poor and the needy, rather than the closed circle of five dozen people.

This inexplicable government decision is all the more confounding in the light of a subsequent disclosure by car importers. The latter claim that they had asked the government “to consider a drop in the revenues from registration tax so that small, clean and new cars can be made more accessible to everyone”.

Considering that there are some 277,000 cars on our roads, the average of which is 14 years, this would have made a difference – both to the

environment and to the car-owning

taxpayers.

The government is reported to have refused on the grounds that it could not afford to. It only says “yes” to the few and the rich.

Government largesse

No wonder that disgruntled tax-payers have “disagreed with the government’s largesse”, as Lino Spiteri has elegantly put it in one of his columns.

This episode evokes John F. Kennedy’s dictum that “political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope”. He also held that, if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Democracy cannot long survive, if it deliberately favours the rich at the expense of the poor. It is not sustainable in conditions where the privileged are cushioned, while the poor and the needy are left to their own devices, and have to struggle against odds for survival.

More than 400 years before Christ, Euripides held the view that “those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues”. Plato said, at about the same time, that “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime”.

Wisdom is imperishable, but some politicians never seem to learn.

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