In the end, this Labour spin was buried by none less than a newer Labour spin, by the length of time a dysfunctional Public Accounts Committee took to get down to it, and not least by the quite simple fact that from allegation to fact one has to prove the allegation. Otherwise we are back to the old Sant claims of ‘moral certitude’ which did not stand up to scrutiny.

The allegation, of course, is that the choice of BWSC for the new power station extension was tainted by corruption which reaches into the very heart of the Gonzi administration.

Now this allegation, in itself, deviated attention from an altogether more important issue – whether the choice of heavy fuel oil as against gas was threatening environmental damage to an already precarious eco-system.

It all came together last week, after years of spin and counter-spin, at two long sittings of the PAC which were reported by some media but not by others and which were then buried under the long preparations in the government-critical media leading up to Friday’s long debate on Arriva and Austin Gatt. No wonder most people did not even register the fact that the PAC sessions were held at all.

Between Tuesday and Wednesday, the committee experienced an indirect confrontation between the man accused of being the king-pin of the network of corruption that led to BWSC, Joe Mizzi, and the man who it turned out was his former employer, the one who was shocked to find out that his employee was running circles behind his back and also the one who brought in a computer expert (who remained unknown) and retrieved the whole shocking trail of emails sent from Joe Mizzi’s password-less computer to BWSC, Joseph Rizzo of Associated Supplies Ltd.

I said the confrontation was an indirect one, for while Mr Mizzi testified on Tuesday and while witnesses were kept waiting in a separate room so that they could not hear what was being said, Mr Rizzo admitted he had listened to Tuesday’s sitting on the internet and even had the time to write down a rebuttal of Mr Mizzi’s story and present it the following day to the PAC as his testimony.

In my opinion, the PAC should have asked more questions and possibly should have staged a direct confrontation between Mr Mizzi and Mr Rizzo. I was listening to the sessions from the office so I missed out on a very valuable facet – the visual.

This, I feel, is where our Parliament is lacking. People are complaining now about the low quality of the Parliament website and its streaming after the music that interrupted Franco Debono’s speech on Friday. I have been saying this for a long time and was once chided by the Clerk for daring to say so.

It will not cost the earth to add picture to sound and to have Parliament’s sittings, as well as those of the committees, streamed over the Internet, especially when Parliament moves to its new building.

Over the past weeks I have been allowed peeks into the Slovak parliament when it was debating the second EFSF agreement, and into the Bundestag when Angela Merkel was speaking just before she went to the summit. I know many people who listened to all the speeches over the radio (best shot) and over the shaky Internet (not so best shot) on Friday. That is democracy at work: imagine how better it would be to have visuals as well and to have links that can travel all over the world – something radio cannot do.

Anyway, on Tuesday there was Mr Mizzi and on Wednesday Mr Rizzo.

The picture I formed of Mr Mizzi is that of a person who dabbles in government contracts all the time. I knew this from my own sources: he has been described to me as the king of contracts and someone at the hearings, maybe BWSC’s Kok Jensen or Mr Rizzo himself, said as much. He was the man who spent 21 years at Enemalta and left when he was Chief Draughtsman but who then went on to earn a living as the person trying to take on any contract or tender on offer.

Mr Mizzi’s replies to the questions he was asked were clear in the way he expressed himself but not articulate enough to explain everything.

At the same time, I must say he faced some questioning that I am afraid would not have been allowed in a Court of Law. There is an important issue here. All through this case, the BWSC case has been brought up and kept on constant boil mainly by one MP, Evarist Bartolo, even though, strictly speaking, the environment was not his particular bailiwick. Then on Tuesday Mr Mizzi found Mr Bartolo sitting on the PAC, as Mr Bartolo normally does. From prime accuser, Mr Bartolo became one of a team of investigation, if we may call PAC that. Some of Mr Bartolo’s questions were also larded with innuendoes and at times heavy sarcasm that, I feel, a judge in a courtroom would have disallowed.

Even so, a hundred insinuations do not add up to one proof. There is more to the issue and I will get to it in a moment.

On the other hand, Mr Rizzo – well you form an idea of someone from his voice, and the few times that Mr Rizzo spoke he did so in a murmuring, hesitant voice. Even other people, called to testify before the PAC had the same kind of voice, but then I noticed a special kind of gentleness on the part of the PAC members, even and especially on the government side, who seemed they did not want to insist on their questions, who insisted they did not want to stress the gentleman, and so on.

But meanwhile, no trace of any corruption surfaced.

Mr Jensen’s testimony was the best – courteous, exhaustive, and he must have had all documentation with him, which not even the Permanent Representative in Brussels, normally so exact and detailed, had.

For all the claims and insinuations that were made, as I said, nothing has been proved. Except to reveal the real state of affairs at Enemalta.

For that we have the clear testimony of David Spiteri Gingell to thank, even though it was completely underreported or not reported at all.

The picture Mr Spiteri Gingell painted of Enemalta was of a corporation in shambles. In fact, he said, he resigned because he wanted to restructure the company but was not allowed to by the minister, and was called ‘arrogant’ to boot.

The issue, in a nutshell is this: at one point a National Power Generation Plan was drawn up and accepted by Cabinet. This spoke of a power station extension based on gas, but there was not then, nor is there now, an infrastructure capable of bringing enough supply of gas to keep the power station working.

Mr Spiteri Gingell said that in his time at Enemalta there was the terrible time when a December storm kept the ship bringing gas (a far lower quantity than would have been required by the power station) from reaching our shores and Malta was just a couple of hours away from running out of gas. Imagine that happening to gas fuelling the power station.

Now I agree that gas would have been a far cleaner fuel to use, but the plain fact is that almost 10 years from the drawing up of the national plan, we are still without the infrastructure to bring gas to Malta in enough quantities that we do not have to rely on ships.

The way the Labour spin on the whole thing went portrayed BWSC as the villain of the piece. I hold no candle to them, but it will take more than a politically-inspired spin to make me believe this.

Again, much was made of that part of Mr Mizzi’s testimony where he said he chose Zaren Vassallo from the Yellow Pages as one of the possible contractors to build the extension. I find it rather difficult to believe that Mr Vassallo and his company were not that known to anyone like Mr Mizzi but then I find it far harder to believe that the whole BWSC affaire was engineered by Mr Vassallo, who had his employee in a related company, Alex Tranter, as Enemalta chairman, so that he gets the contract to build the extension.

In conclusion, this was a spin that died a natural death – although many people will still believe there was hanky-panky behind it. It died because the PAC, what with Austin Gatt’s earlier refusals and with summer intervening and with so much else, took far too long to come to the hearings, and lastly because last week everybody’s attention was hijacked by another Labour spin that overshadowed the BWSC spin.

There will still be a question mark over the whole thing, as there is in so many cases where a disgruntled bidder who loses out on a tender makes all sorts of claims about the person/company that gets it. Such as on the Mater Dei medical and IT equipment and on so many other contracts. No need to go as far back as the famous bus ticketing machines issue.

And there will be bigger questions on the choice of technology. But now that the extension is almost at commissioning stage, unless a new fact intervenes, it has all become rather irrelevant.

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(*) Taken from one of Horace’s famous quotes in his Ars Poetica “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus” – The mountains will be in labour, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth (all that work and nothing to show for it)