As I glance over the many dire predictions for today’s weather on the proliferating weather pages on Facebook, I am reminded more and more of signs of an approaching very different storm: the political one.

This past week I made it a point of going to Parliament to sit in on the Public Accounts Committee meeting on the report by the National Audit Office.

Meeting behind closed doors in an otherwise abandoned Parliament (one entered by a side door leading to yet another side door), the PAC meetings nevertheless occupied the attention of quite a number of people who could follow the proceedings through the voice and, the latest novelty, video screening. I still hold, however, that sitting in gives a real feeling of what was happening, rather than merely following the web screening, and even more from the rather tendentious reports on the print media.

So far, PAC has met five times in the past week and has consumed 16 hours of close questioning of the NAO staff. The next meeting, on Tuesday, 10 September, will see the beginning of the questioning of people at the very top of Enemalta in the years 2008 – 2010, the span of time investigated by the NAO report. The officials in question – Alex Tranter, Edmund Gatt Baldacchino, Pippo Pandolfino, Philip Borg, Janice Mercieca – will not be let in all together in the room but will be held somewhere else and not allowed to listen to the testimony of the others – a rather futile move as I see it, in these days of WiFi, IPads and web screening.

All in all, after this first week, it’s not looking good at all for the former administration.

This is not just because of the NAO report and the discussion in PAC but because of the wider issues involving many times the same people, the same institution – Enemalta – and the same timeframe or more.

There were three corners to the PAC discussion and each side had its good points and its bad moments.

The NAO team was led by the Auditor General and his deputy, both experienced war horses, aided by an equally experienced staffer sitting in the chairs reserved for the (absent) public. Then there were two young staffers – Keith Mercieca and on Friday Krista Vella (her name was mangled in print, from Christa to Crystal).

Although they had to endure long periods of probing questions, especially from the Opposition side, these two did not exhibit any reverential fear as they parried questions and argued points.

Still, I do not agree with two of their main points.

The main bone of contention on Monday was the NAO comment that Minister Austin Gatt’s email on hedging below a certain benchmark amounted to ‘undue ministerial interference’ when I think the minister would have been irresponsible to allow oil prices to the consumer rise and rise when that government was committed to a no price increase of fuel products.

The second point emerged on Friday when NAO kept insisting that the Chalmers Report of 2006 was all about hedging and that the only policy about fuel procurement was a 2011 document which lists procedures, rather than policies.

Still, the Opposition members made a determined attempt to, let me be mild, browbeat the NAO staff especially with questions as to who had written the report and whether it was the same person who had written the equally damning BSWC report. The NAO staff did not let this faze them.

The Opposition side consisted most of the time of just three members – Jason Azzopardi who understood his role as PAC chairman as being that of a contributing chairman (a very novel bearing), Beppe Fenech Adami and Kristy Debono (who was rather silent especially on Friday).

As I said last week, it was inevitable that the Opposition would try to undermine the report and defend Austin Gatt. But the gathering clouds for Dr Gatt, rendered far worse by the Arriva troubles, will not be blown away by questions by Opposition members in PAC.

The government side was composed of Chris Agius, Justyne Caruana, Luciano Busuttil and led by Owen Bonnici. Maybe one could argue the government should have sent other people, first of all Leo Brincat on whose speech in Parliament the NAO investigation (well, analysis, because NAO insists this was not an investigation) was born.

But Dr Bonnici was good, very good. He asked question after question that showed he had mastered the report.

Even so, Dr Bonnici seemed to prefer to ask questions outside the NAO remit and timeframe and to connect people and names from the report to other issues regarding Enemalta and fuel procurement, which are now the subject of criminal investigations for which people like former chairman Tancred Tabone, Frank Sammut, and others have been arraigned. There is no hard and fast line separating the NAO report on procedures and systems from 2008 to 2010 to the period immediately preceding this, which relates to Mr Tabone’s chairmanship and his immediate successors.

For his revelations, George Farrugia, agent of Totsa, has been granted a presidential pardon but on Friday we heard how many times Totsa had been granted fuel procurement contracts at the time when scribbled notes were left instead of proper minutes, how many times the Fuel Procurement Committee did not follow procedures of calling MITA to be given a special password to unlock bidders for a contract, how once a Totsa bid was somehow mislaid but it was still being considered the day after the contract had been assigned (to lose the bid because the specifications did not match), and so on.

The two issues march side by side in parallel – the NAO investigation in PAC and the court procedures. At the end, what remains is precisely what the NAO investigation set out to establish – that Malta’s only energy provider does not have what a proper two-bit company should have: transparency, procedures and policies.

Maybe the coming hearings will show that to instil proper procedures and full transparency did not involve rocket science but just a clear understanding of business practice and common sense.

Maybe too the present government hell-bent on appointing supporters to all offices has not understood what to me stands out from all this: that Austin Gatt’s downfall began when he started to appoint people he trusted and who then proceeded to do what they are alleged to have done.

Enemalta, we heard last week, is the heart of the country, a very special case. It does not have the comfort that other government offices have – the ability to issue tenders, allow them to be scrutinized by the Contracts Committee according to European best practice, and which unsatisfied bidders can appeal – for to do things this way may leave Malta without fuel and without electricity.

Its methods are complicated – the best one I heard regarded the storage of diesel which is brought in by the supplier, stored at Has-Saptan which the supplier leases from the government, and then, when the government needs it, is pumped back to what they call the dolphin, and then by barge to where it is needed.

Yet at the end of it all, we press a switch and light comes on and our electricity supply (bar a power cut or two) is rather stable and dependable. So it must be that all those people working at Enemalta do know how to deliver.

What the country needs to know is whether there was any monkey business and, if there was, to ensure that those responsible are punished.

I repeat: this should also serve as a timely warning for the present government for sooner or later the time of reckoning will come for all.

And all this while we are living in the shadow of a volcano – not a meteorological one but the great unknown that may follow events in Syria past or present.

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