In a country the size of this one, conflicts of interest easily abound. Sometimes such conflicts are personal, sometimes professional, while at other times they can affect the proper running of the country.

One such case is that of Dr Wenzu Mintoff. Dr Mintoff is a long-standing Malta Enterprise employee. He is known to be a thoroughly decent and upright individual with a long political history. Over the span of his political career, he has held various posts within the Labour Party, Alternattiva Demokratika and again with the Labour Party.

It is indeed a credit to the country’s political tolerance and maturity that while some may feel uncomfortable having a high-ranking full-time employee at a government agency actively involved in politics, he has still been allowed to carry out his full-time duties without interruption.

While he has hosted a highly partisan radio talk show and has contributed regularly as a columnist to the Labour Party’s newspaper Kullhadd, his full-time employer accepted his political activism as a valid right to the expression of political opinion and indeed the right to be active in following one’s convictions.

We know of others in the public service who regularly engage in very public protests, many of which have a distinct anti-government policy tinge, and they are given the full freedom in which to do so.

But any employer in the private sector would perhaps have doubts about the focus of an employee who has busy and active outside working hours pursuits and how those may impinge on the individual’s job and indeed on his job performance – all the more so with a senior position such as that held by Dr Mintoff, who serves as Malta Enterprise’s legal counsel.

Nonetheless, Dr Mintoff carried on with his political duties in tandem with his full time job. So far so good.

But in recent months Dr Mintoff, without seeking clearance from his employer as is required by a code of ethics, of which Dr Mintoff, both as a long-standing public employee and as a lawyer, must have been well aware of, he assumed the position of editor of a national Sunday newspaper.

It is quite beside the point that the newspaper in question is a political one. The editor is the most senior editorial post of a newspaper. It is a job that requires long hours of establishing facts, supplying journalists with leads, ensuring those leads are credible, sifting through virtual mountains of information, tedious research and, above all, ensuring to the best of his or her ability, that readers are presented with the full truth and both sides of any given story. It is the duty of an editor to, as far as possible, to be free of any conflicts of interest and to have the full trust of his employer.

And this is where the country’s typical political bias and, to a certain extent, arrogance is completely missing the picture.

In his position at Malta Enterprise, Dr Mintoff beyond any shadow of a doubt must have access to and is often party to extremely confidential and sensitive business proposals. Prospective investors, both foreign direct investors as well as local investors submit and discuss their investment and business plans for the years ahead with the government agency at which he is employed.

So, the question begs, what is Dr Mintoff supposed to do when and if he comes across information on an individual or a company that would make a great newspaper story? Should he ignore it out of allegiance to his public sector employer and in the process fail in his duty to his readers? To ensure he does not cross his employers, are his hands tied in that, because of his conflict of interest, he can never carry a story about Malta Enterprise or anyone associated with it?

Investment, Malta Enterprise’s area of expertise, is an Opposition battle cry and it is also a cause championed by the government in that it leads to employment and better economic prospects for the country. But the government’s and Opposition’s views on the crucial area are so divergent that Dr Mintoff must surely feel, at least from time to time, that he is in a clearly untenable position.

What if, as the agency’s legal adviser, Malta Enterprise requires legal input on matters such as libel or dealing with information that has been leaked to the media? Can the agency, with full peace of mind, turn to Dr Mintoff for his counsel? Of course it can’t, and this is the whole issue at stake here.

While Dr Mintoff may very well claim political victimisation, and the Labour Party supports his claim, the issue really has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. It just happens to be a political newspaper that he edits, but the same would apply if he were the editor of this or any other newspaper in Malta.

Dr Mintoff has a very clear conflict of interest that ties him down, and by not accepting or wanting to accept this cold, hard fact, he is only bringing himself as well as the Labour Party into a position which is clearly wrong.

Filing a protest claiming political discrimination only further underlines how we often cannot see the obvious in this country and unfortunately only damages the public’s perceptions of what is right and what is wrong.

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