The more the Public Accounts Committee continues to meet, the more the reputation of the National Audit Office is emerging in tatters.

PAC will convene today week in the evening. Any hopes that it would wrap up its work before Parliament reconvenes have long been shelved. In fact, Wednesday’s meeting will continue with Pippo Pandolfino as the witness and he has yet to begin to reply to questions put by the government side.

What Mr Pandolfino stated in his testimony on Friday continued to confirm doubts and questions that have already arisen as to how seriously we can take the NAO report on Enemalta’s fuel procurement procedures.

NAO rightly concludes that given the dearth of proper documentation, it could not establish a proper audit trail and thus conclude that fuel procurement at Enemalta was done in a proper and transparent manner.

But then the whole crux of its argument gets rather weakened by the revelation that it did not think it needed to question the persons who were responsible for Enemalta in the period under examination.

Let’s take a step back here: We do not know, nor has it ever been explained, why the NAO study focused on the period immediately following Tancred Tabone’s chairmanship of Enemalta, that is from 2008 to 2010.

This has to be put into the context of the original revelations concerning fuel procurement being alleged to have taken place when Mr Tabone was chairman.

Given that the NAO did not see fit to ask to interview the people who were responsible for Enemalta during this period - when the world saw oil prices veer from $154 a barrel to $48 - the PAC has taken it upon itself to do what NAO should have done in the first place.

Hence we have seen Alec Tranter, Edmond Gatt Baldacchino, David Spiteri Gingell and now Pippo Pandolfino appear in front of it.

Independently of each other, these four persons have confirmed that fuel procurement was taken very seriously in their time and even if no proper minutes were taken (a mistake, in hindsight) purchasing strategy was implemented with the aim of ensuring more security, and not as a result of levity or a haphazard approach.

Like accountants the world over, NAO focused on the proper paperwork, as it should, and complained when the paperwork was missing. But we have had to listen to the viva voce testimony by these persons to hear about the dire state of Enemalta in those years and of the repeated, and rather failing, attempts to kickstart the corporation into a better state.

We heard how a spate of cold days could send the corporation rushing to get another shipment in. We heard how lack of cash made the corporation skip its VAT and tax payments so as to get a ship in. We heard of an absolutely huge turnover of CEOs and CFOs. We heard of ministerial resistance to giving the corporation the tools it needed (which then led to the creation of ARMS Ltd at a far bigger cost than if the proper persons were allowed to be recruited). The reactions to what was testified by David Spiteri Gingell were not all that convincing.

We also heard how while NAO has stated that there were no minutes taken during meetings, at least one CFO took it upon himself to send a record of the proceedings to his chairman. Whether this practice was continued after his time is yet uncertain.

And on Friday we also heard how it was simply not true that in at least two cases the Fuel Procurement Committee went for bids that were higher than the cheapest one on offer – as alleged by the NAO.

There is much that is useful and right in the NAO report and it has already begun to be implemented (it did not need an NAO report to come to the proper conclusions). But the stink that has been raised and the partisan spin that surrounded the report (and which continues to dominate the media accounts of the PAC meetings) would not have been there had NAO used proper discretion and interviewed all those involved before coming to the conclusions it came to.