At long last, the debate within the Public Accounts Committee has entered a crucial phase. David Spiteri Gingell’s scintillating expose on Monday swept aside many a hypothesis that owed more to simplification and partisan targeting of key figures in the Gonzi administration, than to a quest for the real truth.

DSG’s description of the real situation not at Enemalta (and not just that) reduced the National Audit Office’s report on the fuel procurement shortcomings to mere pencil-pushing.

On the political and personality level, DSG’s strenuous defence of Austin Gatt and his fulminating at ‘South Street’ (where Tonio Fenech’s office was situated at the time) undermined the entire structure of the Labour onslaught that intends to pin all blame on Dr Gatt.

And yet, DSG’s real intention was not to excuse Dr Gatt or blame Mr Fenech, but to tell the Enemalta story as it was.

For instance, in the short spell of time he was Enemalta’s CEO, they faced two huge emergencies: in February, a spell of cold days pushed up the consumption of gas and Enemalta had to quickly source new provisions. Then in March, a ship was coming in with fuel and Enemalta did not have enough money to pay for it, so it stopped VAT and other payments to the government to pay for the shipment.

It was a corporation on its last legs, where they did not even change the curtains from the last time he had been there, in Alfred Sant’s time, in 1998, a full 10 years earlier.

It was a corporation without a management structure, where in normal circumstances a corporation that handles $1 billion a year should have had the accounting and management staff he had been 11 months suggesting, urging, pleading, and begging for.

But the Ministry of Finance kept saying No until DSG could take it no longer and resigned. He had been 11 months in office and he had not even begun to turn around the corporation as he had been  employed to do. It was ‘sweet irony’, as DSG put it, that in the next reshuffle, Tonio Fenech was given Enemalta as part of his brief.

Kristy Debono, who has a financial affairs programme on NET TV, said in rather scandalized tones, that the people DSG was asking for, would have added €2.1 million to Enemalta’s wage bill. DSG rounded on her and told the PAC that ARMS cost €80 million to do what the people he wanted to recruit would have done, among other things. It’s a ‘no-brainer’, he told her.

DSG himself has been attacked and vilified by Labour and its allies in the media for leading the committee that chose the BWSC plant for the power station extension and not only is he unrepentant but recent scientific findings have shown the plant is within EU standards, so much so it has been given a further extension by the same government vilified it while in opposition.

Time and again, the government representatives on the PAC tried to bring DSG back to the straight and the narrow (not to add, the shallow) of the NAO report about minutes not being properly taken, as if taking minutes would have revived Enemalta. Time and again, DSG broke out of this stereotyped blame-game to tell the raw and the crude state of affairs at the corporation that was bled dry by successive PN governments so that at the end, even until today, it has not paid a single euro of its capital expenditure for the first Delimara power station now nearing the end of its useful life.

There is still so much to find out and to discuss both as regards the court proceedings regarding allegations of corruption in fuel procurement and as regards the venture with China. There seems to be no end of this sorry story.