The Maltese House of Representatives has been notable for its inability to scrutinise the work and policies of government with the rigour which a successfully functioning parliamentary democracy requires. Despite the outward appearance of an elaborate series of parliamentary stages in the scrutiny of legislation, the reality is that the whole process is firmly controlled by the government of the day where serious scrutiny by government members goes by default even where it is not actively discouraged. Our Parliament is therefore an ineffective instrument of scrutiny when it comes to the enactment of legislation, the very bedrock of parliamentary business.

However, the situation is even more deficient when it comes to the system of select committees, which were established some 18 years ago to monitor the general work of the executive. These include the Public Accounts Committee, the committees on Social Affairs, Foreign Affairs and others.  The committees are meant to conduct inquiries and issue reports. They sometimes do. They are meant to operate on a consensual and bipartisan basis, thus bestowing a certain amount of authority on their work. On the whole, they rarely do (the Fairmount and the BWSC sagas bear witness to this).

The membership of select committees is chosen by the party managers, including crucially the person to be the chairman. The committees are woefully under-resourced. Their ability to undertake financial scrutiny is poor, except in the case of the PAC, the most important of the select committees, which is serviced by the independent National Audit Office. There is no right for select committee reports to be debated in the House, let alone voted on. They represent in many ways evidence of the intrinsic limitations of effective accountability in our House of Representatives, which reflects a political system with a strong executive and a weak parliament.

It is against this background of Malta’s parliamentary accountability deficit that the PAC inquiry into the report by the Auditor General on “An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Enemalta Corporation’s Fuel Procurement”, which started last Monday, is being dramatically played out. The salient facts are well known by now. The Auditor General’s report provides a detailed performance audit of the work of Enemalta’s fuel procurement committee between 2008 and 2010. It paints a picture of absent documentation and total lack of even the most rudimentary administrative good practice in its processes.

In his report, the Auditor General said that during this period the purchase of fuel in Malta bypassed “the most fundamental principles of good practice”, not all oil purchase contracts went to those with the most favourable bids, and the oil-hedging strategy of the time was influenced “by unwarranted ministerial intervention”. Moreover, no policy framework for the procurement of fuel worth millions of euros a year existed throughout the period in question, this at the very time when the population as a whole was reeling from the swingeing increases in utility rates the (then Nationalist) government had imposed.

The report also provides a small insight into the state of affairs at Enemalta as long ago as 2004 when then Minister Austin Gatt was already the minister responsible, as well as the backdrop to the first proper fuel procurement policy published by the last government in January 2011 soon after responsibility for this crucial aspect of business was moved to then Minister Tonio Fenech. The stage is therefore set for a forensic examination of Malta’s fuel procurement processes from 2008 to 2011 with a fairly good backward glance at the build-up from 2004. 

This is probably the most important parliamentary inquiry ever conducted in the history of the House of Representatives. At stake is not only the personal reputation of the minister who was directly responsible for this whole area of policy throughout the period of the report and before, Austin Gatt, but also the standing and competence of the other Cabinet minister who succeeded him, Tonio Fenech, and the former Prime Minister, Lawrence Gonzi himself, with whom ultimate responsibility for what went on in his government rested.

Beyond the personal reputation and good name of the ministers concerned, however, there loom also the good name and credibility of the PAC, and ultimately Parliament itself. Is the PAC prepared to do its duty objectively and impartially, or are we to witness the usual display of tribal politics and inter-party point-scoring? The acting PAC chairman for this examination, Dr Jason Azzopardi, has said: “We simply want the truth, irrespective of who the persons involved are.” This is as it should be.

Regrettably, the PAC chairman’s good intentions have already been undermined by Nationalist MP Beppe Fenech Adami (who, sadly, has not inherited his father’s good political judgment). He spent most of the first session seeking to build a defence for Austin Gatt on the most specious and rickety basis and attacking the autonomy and integrity of the National Audit Office by wilfully misunderstanding the purpose of the performance audit it had produced, or what it contained.

The duty of the PAC in such inquiries should always be to the House of Representatives and, beyond this, to the nation as a whole. That imperative could not be more important than on this occasion, where all right-thinking people – both Nationalist and Labour – have been shocked at the grotesque inefficiency and the possible criminal fraud perpetrated on the national exchequer perhaps as a direct result of the poor governance which the Auditor General has exposed.

All the members of the PAC carry a profound responsibility. If individual party members resort to party political point-scoring or try to use the inquiry simply as a means either, on the one hand, of protecting the reputation of former Nationalist ministers or their appointees or, on the other, exaggerating the harm which has been done, the inquiry will be inconclusive. There is a grave risk that those who have inflicted great harm on the country will escape retribution and a profound injustice will have been done.

The governing Labour Party has a unique opportunity to demonstrate that it means business when it says that it intends to root out maladministration and corruption in government. It has made a less than persuasive start in this direction since the election with a number of dubious administrative decisions. The way it handles the PAC, where PL members outnumber PN, should give it the opportunity to place the national interest above party, while allowing the facts to speak for themselves.

By far the greater test, however, confronts the Nationalist Party, and most especially Opposition leader Simon Busuttil. If, as seems likely on the basis of the evidence available to date, the Gonzi government was guilty of the most egregious maladministration or worse, the new PN leadership must be absolutely ruthless in condemning what happened. Far better that Simon Busuttil takes the PN’s punishment on the chin than that he should seek (as the misguided Beppe Fenech Adami seems minded to do) to exonerate it.

The reverberations from this inquiry will be felt throughout this Parliament, and possibly in the Law Courts and beyond. It is crucial that both parties strive to reduce the accountability deficit in Parliament.