In the ongoing furore surrounding the Café Premier scandal, we have largely forgotten that there has been a precedent to this: Australia Hall. The corrupt behaviour there was far worse, but yet the scandal was not so great.

I think there are two main reasons for this: the sheen had not yet worn off the Taghna Lkoll government, and the money did not go to businessmen but to the Labour Party. That last should have made it a massive scandal, because the wrongdoing is much worse, but in general people tend not to see it that way. For the government to give money to businessmen is much worse in their eyes than the government giving money to the party in government.

It looks like the Commissioner of Lands, who resigned last September, did not see it that way. From his perspective – there on the inside – both were outrageous, and he took the decision to step away from a lifetime’s career in the civil service rather than have to be a rubber stamp to dreadful decisions taken without his involvement, decisions that serve the public ill but favour friends of the government or, worse still, the political party that forms the government.

In both cases, the government owns the property: the building which houses Cafe Premier and its Great Siege (un)attraction in Valletta, and Australia Hall at St Andrew’s. The leases were held by, in the first case, Cities Entertainment Ltd, and in the second, by the Labour Party. The government was in the process of suing to evict both, for non-payment of rent and in the case of Australia Hall, for gross negligence in allowing the building to fall to pieces. The eviction suits began before Labour was elected to government. When Labour was elected, it dropped them. The intention was clear: rather than get the property back so that it could be used or disposed of for the public good, it planned to strike deals for the benefit of third parties and to the detriment of the public purse.

The Auditor General did not only prepare a report on the Café Premier deal, though this is the report that made the news. He also wrote one about the Australia Hall deal. In both, the sequence of events described shows a certain element of ‘malice aforethought’ by the Labour Party as distinct from the government. For it is clear that in both cases, the government was not acting like the government, but like the Labour Party and putting its own interests before that of the public it is there to serve.

The request for negotiations in the Café Premier case was first made (officially) on 17 May 2013. The request for negotiations in the Australia Hall case was first made (officially) just one week later.

The government (Lands Department) dropped its eviction case against Cities Entertainment (Café Premier) in August 2013. This was before Cabinet took its decision in September – a decision they didn’t know had been taken already by the Prime Minister – to bail out the bankrupt company.

Then in October, the government (Lands Department) dropped its eviction case against the Labour Party (Australia Hall), after a political decision had obviously been taken to leave it in the Labour Party’s hands so that the Labour Party could raise millions for its coffers by selling it on to a group of businessmen.

In all this, the Labour Party – with Joseph Muscat operating as Labour leader rather than as prime minister – called the shots to the government, with the Lands Department being forced to act to benefit the Labour Party rather than safeguard public assets for the public purse, and the Commissioner of Lands being used, in the Chinese fashion, as a rubber-stamp.

The whole thing is shocking, particularly when we bear in mind that it is purely by chance that the Café Premier scandal was revealed. Had it not been for that chance, the entire thing would have remained concealed from the public and possibly even from Cabinet. We have here two significant cases in which the government acted like the Labour Party in the interests of the Labour Party, rather than safeguarding public assets for the public good. It makes you wonder just how much we don’t know about all the other deals that the Labour Party in government has struck to its own benefit. Power stations have been sold and a private company has been given the licence to sell Maltese citizenship. The contracts were published only after a fight in Parliament, and then again, with chunks of them redacted.

In the light of what we do know, we should suspect the worst about what we don’t know.