Last Monday, I was at the European Parliament for a daylong conference on the Single Market, as guest of MEP Louis Grech. I had no idea that I was to witness, so to speak, history being written.

The first session included Jose Barroso, a videoconference with Mario Monti and a message from Jacques Delors, who 20 years ago created the Single Market.

Midway through this session, John Dalli walked in, his undulating steps carrying him in front of everyone to his seat.

I did not comment about it at the time, but Barroso’s eyes bore into Mr Dalli’s back.

Later on in the evening, when we still had no idea what was about to happen, we commented about it and agreed it was bad form for a commissioner to walk in late, especially after the Commission President had made his speech. So we ascribed Barroso’s stare into Dalli’s back as anger at this breach of etiquette.

Mr Dalli and Mr Grech then took their place on the podium for the second session. Again, certain things you remember later when you have become aware of developments, but I distinctly remember noticing that Mr Dalli was yawning visibly on the podium and that some of his replies were almost off the mark and anyway showed that he was not really prepared to discuss the subject.

In the evening, someone remarked he had also nodded off during the session. I did not see that.

That was it. The next thing we knew, the story broke on RTK on Tuesday afternoon while we were on our way to the airport. From comparing the timelines made public later, it seems Mr Dalli was called in by Mr Barroso at around 4pm on Tuesday and was asked to resign. He tried to gain more time and consult his lawyer/s but Mr Barroso told him that he had to resign or a statement would be issued at 5pm.

The issue, as we all know, has turned us all into colpevolisti and innocentisti, since in the way we have become, we tend to judge first and seek reason later. We take sides instinctively instead of waiting for the facts to materialise. Thus, we easily become victims of spin, and this has been vastly evident over the past days.

Mr Dalli says he is innocent and has vowed to defend his name. That’s a fact.

Equally, it is also a fact that he has now been forced to resign.

Another fact is that Malta’s name in the EU has been terribly besmirched. Such a forced resignation from the Commission is unprecedented.

The Maltese we met in Brussels this past week have told us how ashamed they felt at the very fact that they were Maltese. It will take long years to re-establish our national name as an honest people.

Yet, and this is what really angers me, Malta was doing extremely well in the EU. There has not been any complaint by the Commission about the way in which Malta spent all the money it got for the years 2004 – 2006, the accounts for which closed in 2009. Proportionately speaking, Malta was also the country that used the most of the available funds.

In fact, Malta has made such a name for itself, as far as the correct handling of funds is concerned, that the Malta office has been handed responsibility for checking the funds, possibly alone among new entrants.

Thanks mainly, to Richard Cachia Caruana’s hard work, the Representation Office in Dar Malta has become an extremely efficient machine that connects the Malta ministries to the Commission. It is tragic that such work has been cut short by personal vendettas masked as political outrage. Even so, Mr Cachia Caruana’s successor is running the ship in a very efficient manner and anyway, there had to be an end to the Cachia Caruana years someday.

Labour is full of Cachia Caruana wannabes, but they will have to prove themselves when the time comes.

Whatever happens to John Dalli, the spin of the past days has clouded the issue. The crux of the matter is not whether Mr Dalli is guilty according to Maltese law or Commission practice but rather, whether this situation could have been avoided or not.

Let me go back to 2004 and the leadership battle. As Minister of Finance, Mr Dalli was associated, among other things, with the sale of Mid-Med Bank to HSBC and the sale of the airport to Vienna International Airport. I remember writing an editorial daily for a whole month on the HSBC issue as Alfred Sant went about imitating Martin Luther and sticking statements to bank doors. I still think getting HSBC in, whatever the price of the shares, was incalculable to get Malta on the international map.

As for MIA, I was very much in favour (and still am in part) but maybe the elimination of competitor Alterra was due to Libyan fears about the CIA looking over Gaddafi’s backyard. And maybe Alterra would have taken MIA to greater heights instead of building shopping malls.

Anyway, in the February 2004 leadership election, although not a party member, I was very attracted to the idea of Mr Dalli as the new party leader. I remember going to that press business breakfast at the Hilton’s upper lounge, with Saviour Balzan resplendent in his Sunday suit welcoming us, and the feeling we were on the cusp of a new era.

It was not to be, Mr Dalli must have been fed a whole lot of wrong information about the delegates’ preferences or something else. Anyway, he came a bad second and is yet to recover from that.

Fast forward to January 2008. At around 9am on a Sunday morning, I got a phone call from an irate Mr Dalli regarding a story we carried that day (David Lindsay and I had found the story and David wrote it). It regarded some $20 million of the savings of many US persons whose funds, which were supposed to be invested in the Bermudas, somehow ended up in Malta.

That phone call was the first intimation Mr Dalli was somehow involved. He argued we were doing a lot of harm because we ‘wrote things without checking them.’

An hour later, I received a call from an equally irate American guy, who was directly implicated in the company we mentioned. Then he passed on the phone to another person, who, to my utter surprise turned out to be Labour MP Noel Farrugia.

Now that Sunday was the day Alfred Sant returned to his party after his serious illness and the party had organised a big do at CNL. Yet Mr Farrugia was not there, but at a Floriana office.

They insisted we go in for a meeting the next day but I had some problems with my car and Mr Farrugia himself came for me at Zebbiegħ, where we were living then.

When we got to Floriana, we found a number of canvassers lounging outside, and inside we found Mr Dalli sitting at one end of a big table and Mr Farrugia at the other. The American guy was in the middle and next to him was a lawyer from Munich who treated us to a lecture in ethics in journalism, as he saw them.

Court action regarding this issue is still ongoing. The money has still, to my knowledge, not been recovered and there is much more to this.

Anyway, I was flabbergasted, and while I have never written about this till today, I made sure that people who matter got to know about this unlikely and suspicious combination, from people close to the prime minister, to US Ambassador Molly Bordonaro, to the high echelons of the Labour Party – although I did not speak to Joe Muscat, I know from comments he made to a third party, that he knew all about it.

Let them deny it if they dare.

Having said all this, my opinion is that even more than this Commissioner appointment, Dr Gonzi risked conflicts of interest galore when he made John Dalli minister of health, notwithstanding Mr Dalli’s alleged involvement – always at a distance – with at least two big tenders for Mater Dei, the medical equipment tender and the IT tender.

I also remember Mr Dalli’s last days before he was nominated as Commissioner, when he sent for us to show us his plans for the ministry, as if he was not going to be appointed Commissioner, while I was hearing he was rarely in at the ministry, or at least he had many private visits abroad.

So yes, if there is one person to blame for this fiasco, it is Lawrence Gonzi. He knew he had damaged goods and yet he palmed them off to Brussels to get them off his back (as he saw it).

Dr Gonzi must know many more stories about John Dalli than I do. There was also that airline tickets affair, which led to Mr Dalli’s enforced resignation as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

There were also his relations with Libya and with the Iranian shipping line.

Certain people, such as Lou Bondi, made a big deal about Mr Dalli’s frequent appearances on One TV with Norman Hamilton, but that should have been the least of worries.

When in Brussels, last Friday, I heard Dr Gonzi make that remarkable statement that he has no regrets at having appointed John Dalli as Commissioner, and later say that he did not know anything bad about him, I realised conclusively that here was a man who has well and truly lost it.

He has brought this on himself by way of his favourite vice – his short-termism, his penchant for resolving an immediate problem and worrying about it later. Look where it has got him. And look where it has got us.

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