Antonio de Curtis, better known by his stage name ‘Toto’, was a brilliant Italian actor and comedian whom I relished seeing on Italian television during my childhood. His drama, poetry and songs are also considered to be outstanding works of art. Born in Naples in 1898 to a single Sicilian mother, he was later recognised and adopted by his marquis father.
He was so popular with Italian audiences that when he died at the age of 69 in 1967, he had to have three funerals. One of his most famous anecdotes in Italian is “....e Io pago!”, meaning that while government ministers and state employees are misbehaving and acting in a less than ethical manner, the ordinary citizen, including himself, then has to foot the bill!
I imagine that the decision by the present government to dispense with charging individuals and companies that arranged to have their electricity meters tampered with for financial gain would have been met by Toto with the same remark. I cannot imagine by what stretch of the imagination the Hon. Owen Bonnici decides that this act was not consonant with an act of bribery. The government magnanimously decides to forgive hundreds of individuals and companies tampering with their electricity meters after paying state energy employees thousands of euros, and consequently letting them off the hook. It decides to only charge the state energy employees who are considered as the big fish in this scandal. Who are the individuals and companies involved in this scam? Where are the big fish? It is in the public interest to know who these people are. Or is this another covert operation by the state to meet its own finis?
In my book, the moral object of bribery is defined as passing money to others for favours that are strictly irregular or illegal. The moral act is extant if the individual had was compos mentis and had the intention of bribing a public official for his or her own benefit and it is obvious that these thousands of people knew that they were cheating the state and their fellow country-men for their own economic and personal benefit. I fail to see how – ethically and legally – the Hon. Owen Bonnici has difficulty recognising this as bribery, his good self being a learned doctor of laws. The police also have a clear case of bribery and corruption before them here and are free and obliged to act independently. Or are the police also now becoming the vassals of the state? Is this a case of back to the eighties?
I question the rationale behind this decision. Could it be that the PL had a quick look at the names and decided that, comparing them to their PLHQ-computerised lists of how people usually vote in elections, there was a majority of – or too many – PL voters on the list and they decided not to irritate them now on the eve of a national vote for the EU parliament? Could it also be that there were people on the list that they felt obliged to protect?
This whole episode is as ridiculous as it is serious and is a further slide along the ethical slippery slope that led the previous Labour government in the seventies and the eighties to the moral and legal quandary that it led the whole country to then. The big fish depend on the small fish to get fat and the small fish depend on the big fish to get away with it and have their worms! Keep doing that for a number of times repetitively and it soon transpires that both the small fish and the big fish get the idea that with money it is possible to do what one likes and that every public official has his price. Then there grows a moral void that eventually swallows up the government because it becomes difficult to see who is corrupt and who is not and the government starts becoming associated with the vices against which it is supposed to protect ordinary citizens.
Where do we go from here? Usually, a government falls when citizens start to perceive it as being morally corrupt and become fed up with it. It also falls when the economy, including the creation of new jobs, starts to not perform so well. If I were the government, I would really start to worry because there seems to be problems regarding both these factors. In 1956, Toto lost most of his eyesight because of a manifest infection for which he did not seek medical attention, as he did not want to cancel shows and disappoint his fans. We seem to have a government that is growing increasingly blind to corruption because it too does not want to disappoint its fans!
Does the government even think that it may ever lead us all to a virtuous existence by leading blindly? Does it even think it will ever win elections this way, or does it play on the perception that all politics is corrupt in order to get away with it? The PL was always a party of the public (as a sum of individual interests) and individual personal interest rather than one of the common good and is now continuing to prove it. My personal prayer to all this is Domine ut videam! Lord I pray that we may see, even for those who have the eyes to do so!
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