So much has been said, and is being said in today's issue, about the finance minister's deeds or misdeeds depending on how one views the situation, that we will not excessively belabour the point in this page's columns - Noel Grima (see page 17) and other columnists have taken the issue thoroughly to task.

That the finance minister has erred is not in question. Regardless of whether the decision to board that flight was taken out our naivety or more sinister purposes, neither quality is one sought in a finance minister.

But as a single side note to the controversy, one should also consider the hypothetical scandal of the finance minister being given a lift in a vehicle owned by one of the businessmen in question to the Ta Qali stadium to watch a football match in their company and from a seat purchased by one of them.

But what has not but should be addressed is that the finance minister's actions are, in actual fact, the mere tip of the iceberg that is the government's hand-in-glove relationship with the commercial community.

From the prime minister himself opening showrooms to his ministers attending, speaking at and heaping praise at commercial function after commercial function - the practice of the government endorsing commercial activities, under what is an apparent guise of fostering economic and commercial development, is widespread, rampant and continues relentlessly without any checks and balances being applied.

Recent months have seen even greater transgressions.

We had a President of the Republic paying a visit to a development project overseas just as the Maltese company undertaking the development was in the midst of a public bond offer.

Almost simultaneously, we had a prime minister paying a high profile visit, well attended by the media, to another Maltese company that was also in the midst of a bond issue.

Could either of these two occurrences be deemed naïve or something more sinister? In either case the actions of the head of state and the head of government were highly inappropriate, perhaps even more so than what the finance minister did by having boarded that plane.

It is, perhaps, this widespread attitude of failing to draw a clear demarcation line between the commercial sector - from which many of our MPs, ministers and the prime minister himself hail - that has laid the foundation of the government's attitude toward business that we see again and again today.

The line is excessively thin and the government needs a new code of ethics to transcend all this.

High time

The government's three-day successive media blitz between Thursday and yesterday, at first glance, appeared to be a case of public relations overkill at a time when the government is finding itself with its back up increasingly up against the wall and desperate to inject at least a modicum of feel good factor into the country and its administration.

But as the details of the government's plans for next year's reform of the public transportation system began to emerge over the last three days, it became evident that such an approach was absolutely warranted given the breadth of the plans, which appear to have left no stone unturned in the long quest to establish a professional, up to international standard public system that the country has been deprived of for so long.

As lead minister Austin Gatt explained yesterday, Malta holds the highest ratio of vehicles on the roads, and a mere 12 per cent of Maltese use public transport at the moment as against the 50 per cent EU average.

It is, of course, little wonder that the Maltese percentage is so low. The state of the current fleet (where else in Europe are rattling buses considered quaint tourist attractions?) and the attitude of some, not all, bus drivers, has been not only uninviting but downright deplorable in so many cases.

From night buses to electric buses, from new route structures to strict timings, and from limiting the numbers of buses populating the crowded Valletta terminus to a whole new design for the area, the list as detailed in today's front page story goes on and on.

If wildly successful, which it most definitely will be at least in the first months as large swathes of the population will undoubtedly be eager to try the new fleet and system out for themselves, it could work wonders for the country's carbon footprint - firstly due to a lower emission bus fleet, and secondly by taking more private vehicles off the roads.

If even modestly successful, the new system will be an environmental boon.

No doubt it is time, high time, that such steps are taken.

Peace or piecemeal prize?

Much has also been said, positive and negative, about the recent announcement that this year's Nobel Peace Prize is to be conferred upon US President Barack Obama. The opponents, practically foaming at the mouth, have put the prize down to a matter of wishful thinking, arguing that Mr Obama is undeserving of the prize because none of the bold statements he has made on long-festering international ailments have yet materialised into concrete results.

But those crying foul have missed the point, the point spelled out by Alfred Nobel, the one-time owner of Bofors, the pre-eminent Swedish-based arms manufacturer who perhaps suffered something of a bout of conscience over his invention of dynamite, much as Albert Einstein later rued the day he laid the groundwork for the invention of the atom bomb.

In his legacy, Nobel himself instructed that the Peace Prize be awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses".

Commenting while announcing the prize, Nobel committee head Thorbjoern Jagland hit the nail squarely on the head: "Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

"... Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."