The government must be thinking that the national airline is a playground for selective confidentiality

Parliamentary questions (PQs) are placed at question time in order for the public, to whom ministers and members of parliament (MPs) are accountable, to be informed about matters that are of public interest. Placing PQs is not just the domain of Opposition MPs but it is a faculty widely used by government MPs too. The public has a right to know how revenues are collected and how they are then spent, besides a host of other things, and ministers are obliged to answer PQs expeditiously and meticulously.

Devious replies meant to withhold information to the public are a serious matter and can lead to serious consequences. In my 14 years as an MP I have in some instances harboured doubts about the correctness of the replies made to the House, but I will limit myself to stating that recent history is replete with arrogance in the way PQs are answered. Let me just explain that the distinction between a devious reply and an arrogant one is a very fine one indeed.

As an MP it is not my lot to poke my nose into the way a private company manages its own finances. It has its own regulator called the MFSA to do that job, particularly if it is indulging in negligent or fraudulent business. But a public company is managed by public funds. It is run by a government appointed chairman or CEO and its business is run by a government appointed board. Decisions taken by the chairman, CEO and the board are subject to public scrutiny and MPs are within their rights to place questions and to have them properly answered.

Last week I asked the minister politically responsible for Air Malta to provide me with details about recently appointed overseas consultants and their remuneration, as I am informed that these consultants are suddenly hatching like chicks and preparing reports on even the most mundane of matters. I took the appropriate task to put the pertinent question instead of shooting off the hip. It took the minister three weeks to say with a straight face that he cannot divulge information as it is ‘commercially sensitive’ and therefore confidential.

I thought that the reply was as intriguing and mysterious as a tale from the old TV fiction series The X-Files, with FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully chasing aliens but never quite getting their hands on one, which I am still fond of watching.

How much if at all is information about the number of advisors engaged and their remuneration ‘commercially sensitive’? Frankly, I find it rather odd how such information could possibly harm the ‘commercial’ interests of the airline or ‘prejudice the restructuring process’ when barely a couple of weeks ago the Air Malta management, presumably with the blessings of the chairman, CEO and the minister himself, circulated a memo to employees forecasting a whopping €30 million loss - news, you cannot possibly disagree, scarier than the appearance of the Roswell alien.

If dissemination of information about overseas advisors engaged with the airline would, in the opinion of the minister, constitute a competitive threat to the airline, are we then to assume that blowing vuvuzelas about Air Malta’s financial losses is a matter of mundane importance to other airlines, once management thought it fit to casually circulate memos around?

Go tell it to the marines! Refusing to reply to parliamentary questions about the astronomical number of overseas advisors that are periodically being engaged at Air Malta to prepare ad hoc reports of little value to the restructuring process itself has absolutely nothing to do with anything remotely connected to - ‘commercial sensitivity’ - a convenient but nonetheless hollow cliché solely meant to conceal plain and simple shame and embarrassment.

Had I been grossly wrong about the more or less 22 overseas consultants that I mentioned in one of my supplementary questions, make no mistake the minister would have catapulted out of his seat to denounce me as some prophet of doom trying to capture the headlines with figments of the imagination. He has yet to realise that his silence is actually giving rise to the suspicion that I am not off the mark at all.

Did we not commission with so much pomp Ernst and Young to prepare a report on the restructuring process at a cost reportedly running into millions of euros? What has become of it that now the airline is importing more and more consultancies at undisclosed salaries?

Air Malta was given a lifeline with the injection of a €52 million loan from public coffers. It is the duty of the airline to spend it well. And it is also the duty of the government to make sure that taxpayers are not unknowingly feeding any gravy trains.

Dr Gulia is the Opposition’s Main Spokesman for Tourism and Air Malta