The moniker King of Lands passed into popular parlance some months ago when Michael Falzon’s questionable ‘customer care officer’, Clint Scerri, used it to describe himself on Facebook. Or perhaps it was his colleagues who called him that on his Facebook Timeline. Either way, it’s now irrelevant. Scerri featured in the Auditor-General’s report on the Gaffarena scandal as a man who took customer care a little too literally, accompanying Marco Gaffarena to places and meetings he shouldn’t have. Scerri is a political appointee, otherwise known as somebody who fills a ‘position of trust’, which means that he can be dismissed – but something tells me that he will be retained on the state payroll as that seems to be the system now. And obviously, he knows too much and his wife, mother and brother have been put on the state payroll too – the first two at the Employment & Training Corporation (Clint Scerri’s mother canvasses for the Education Minister, Evarist Bartolo), and the brother as a driver at the Courts of Justice.

We need to keep an eye on that Clint Scerri and the rest of his state-employed tribe, but for now let’s look at something far more important. People forget that the real King of Lands is none other than Joseph Muscat, the Prime Minister. People forget, too (or perhaps they never knew), that the Prime Minister is the primus inter pares – the first among equals; in other words that he is a cabinet minister like the rest of them. And as a cabinet minister, he has a portfolio. Muscat is the first prime minister I remember not to retain quite a hefty portfolio. When he first came to power almost three years ago now and distributed portfolios among his ministers, there was some comment about the fact that he held no portfolio himself. Ah, but he did have a portfolio, and that portfolio was lands – in other words, state-owned real estate. His possession of the Lands portfolio was and still is masked by the fact that he had an underling, a parliamentary secretary.

We have come to treat parliamentary secretaries as sorts of junior ministers and full-blown members of the cabinet, but in reality they are not. They are underlings to cabinet ministers, reporting to the cabinet minister who in turn reports to the Prime Minister. Parliamentary secretaries all have a boss, and that boss is the cabinet minister. The parliamentary secretary for health, Chris Fearne, for example, reports to Konrad Mizzi, the Health Minister. So the Minister for Lands was never the parliamentary secretary Michael Falzon but was and still is the Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat. He has not found it at all convenient to remind us of this, as he stood by while Falzon went down. But the fact remains that just as Konrad Mizzi is the Minister for Health despite there being a parliamentary secretary for health, called Chris Fearne, so Joseph Minister is Minister for Lands. If something goes very badly wrong at the state general hospital, we are all clear in our minds that it is Konrad Mizzi who will have to carry the can. And likewise, it should be clear in our minds that Joseph Muscat, as Minister for Lands, should have carried the can for his ministry’s corrupt dealings with Marco Gaffarena. But it isn’t clear in our minds at all, and that’s because Muscat has systematically done what he is most good at: playing a dirty game while presenting a false front to the public and sacrificing others for his own survival.

When Joseph Muscat liaised with others and struck his deals in that far greater scandal, one which involved twice as much money, the infamous Café Premier case, he did not do so as Prime Minister, though this is what people seem to think. He did so as Minister for Lands. It was solely because he was Lands Minister that he was able to take decisions in a case that involved the lease of state-owned property. And on that matter too, the Auditor-General was scathing. But somehow, Muscat survived it without resigning. He couldn’t feed his parliamentary secretary to the dogs because his own name was on the emails in which the deal was struck – his personal Gmail address, to be more specific. And he survived it because he and his government were not as unpopular then as they are now. But this time Muscat felt that a human sacrifice would be expedient on the altar of increasingly negative public opinion, so he slit Falzon’s throat and bled him into a bucket.

I think lots of people need to be reminded that it was Muscat, too, who as King of Lands gave instructions for the government’s case against the Labour Party, for the repossession of Australia Hall - a civil suit initiated before he became prime minister – to be withdrawn. This has allowed the Labour Party, the party he leads, to transfer Australia Hall, which the state still owns but of which the Labour Party has possession, to a private company for commercial development, putting several millions into the party coffers.

The King of Lands, Joseph Muscat, did that – a massive scandal from which he distanced himself personally, rather than resigning. He was able to do so largely because people are badly informed about his role as Minister for Lands. But the fact remains that Joseph Muscat, Minister for Lands, is directly responsible for his corrupt decisions on Australia Hall, the Café Premier and – let there be no doubt in our mind about this – Marco Gaffarena.

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