The Prime Minister is reportedly vacationing in Dubai, very fitting considering there are few better places where to bury one’s head in the sand. But whether he is in Dubai or not is quite irrespective of the fact that the Prime Minister is, time and time again, recoiling from taking any sort of immediate and concerted action when it some to the alleged misdoings of any member of his Cabinet.

Politicians facing very serious accusations are permitted to carry on as though it is business as usual.  And they are allowed to do so as the government either bounces investigations from one institution to another, or hides behind audits instead of taking the kind of bold and concrete action required when his elected Members of Parliament, Cabinet members at that, are facing serious allegations of misconduct.

In the case of Michael Falzon, the Prime Minister waited for an inordinate amount of time before even asking one of them to step down, even temporarily, while very serious accusations were levelled in their regard. This, under normal democratic standards in what passes for normal democracies, would be unacceptable but the fact that members of Cabinet are allowed to carry on seemingly unperturbed has been pretty much par for the course over these last three-odd years.

The Prime Minister waited for months on end and exhausted every investigation conceivable before taking the inevitable action of asking him to tender his resignation – even though the fact that something was seriously wrong with his stewardship of the Lands Department was more than apparent from the early stages of that particular scandal. But nevertheless, the Parliamentary Secretary was allowed to cling to power for several months as the investigative wheels turned, and turned very slowly at that.

The case of Ian Borg is even worse. The same process was employed, as the government waited for first an investigation by the Ombudsman, which had a perfectly clear result, and then a parallel investigation by the Permanent Commission Against Corruption.

The end result was that the government completely ignored the Ombudsman’s ruling and authority as a constitutionally-appointed body. Over the past week, former Ombudsman Joseph Said Pullicino and the President of the Republic both remarked about the executive branch of government’s failure to take any action whatsoever on the Office of the Ombudsman’s damning findings from its investigation into how Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg secured planning permission for his Rabat development.

Dr Borg has been in the eye of a storm since last year following a probe into the circumstances in which the Malta Environment and Planning Authority issued a development permit for a property he bought in 2014 in Rabat. A report by the Commissioner for Environment and Planning in the Office of the Ombudsman very clearly described his methods of applying for and obtaining a development permit as ‘devious’ and that someone at Mepa had made a “deliberate” error that led to Dr Borg’s permit being approved.

But rather than implementing the Ombudsman’s recommendations immediately in the wake of the report, as should have been done, the Prime Minister decided to await the conclusions of another parallel inquiry conducted by the permanent Commission Against Corruption, which supported the Ombudsman’s findings – and then proceeded to completely ignore them both.

Nothing was done by the Prime Minister, who preferred to ignore the case in the hope that it would just go away. But the case clearly will not go away, and the Prime Minister stands accused of ignoring the Ombudsman’s constitutional authority.

Standards of political accountability and good governance dictate that Dr Borg should have been shown the door as soon as the Ombudsman’s report was published.

Now, the Prime Minister’s energy and health minister, the beleaguered Konrad Mizzi, has admitted opening up a secret company in Panama and breaking tax laws by not declaring a parallel trust in New Zealand while in office.

Just as in the Falzon and Borg cases, we are now meant to wait for some kind of undefined and vague audit the minister says he has requested the tax commissioner to undertake, as well as an audit by an undisclosed “international firm”.

Given the reverberations of Panamagate, let alone the basics of good governance, the Prime Minister should have at least, at the very least, offered the platitude of having him step down until his audits were concluded and he is given the all clear, so to speak. And here it should be noted that any such ‘all clear’ will be inevitable but nevertheless still highly suspect, considering the blanket and utter secrecy provided by the Panamanian fiscal regime.

In other European countries ministers have resigned, not just temporarily stepped down, over far less grievous allegations. Just this week, the Belgian justice and interior ministers offered their resignations saying that they had failed their people after the Brussels bombs.

One wonders whether any such resignations would be offered in the eventuality that such an attack is perpetrated here in Malta. Our guess is, sadly, that any such resignation would not be tendered or demanded.

The government’s failure to act on any of these cases is not a sign of strength, it demonstrates an ingrained arrogance in the country’s governance, which is a far cry from the tenets of good governance, transparency and accountability that it pledged to introduce if voted into power. 

As matters stand, the government’s treatment of these cases amounts to no more than government-sponsored zero accountability, ably assisted by a Prime Minister burying his head in the sand each and every time a new storm blows in, and keeping it there until it blows over.