John Bundy should sit down in his big, new office at Public Broadcasting Services, write a new song and call it Pajjiz tal-Mafja.
Pajjiz tal-Mickey Mouse, or as he had spelled it, Miki Maws, is now more than a little out of date. Yesterday, the board of directors at the public service broadcaster voted by secret ballot – apparently, it’s normal procedure – on Bundy’s appointment as the new chief executive officer, and they voted in favour. Yes, even the worst coward with no place on the board of directors of anything at all, let alone the country’s national broadcaster, could have voted against and nobody would have been any the wiser. But they didn’t. Not only is the PBS board of directors a rubber-stamp outfit, but it is a recklessly irresponsible rubber-stamp outfit. The Prime Minister chooses the CEO and they fall over themselves to agree, allowing the Prime Minister to say that the hopeless John Bundy was not his choice but that of the board of directors.
Do those people actually know what the board of directors of a limited liability company, let alone one with such important public responsibilities, is for? They are there to ensure that the best decisions possible are taken for the company and its performance. This means that the board of directors of Public Services Broadcasting Ltd should have voted against John Bundy’s appointment as CEO, and they should also have insisted that the appointment process be changed to allow for an open call, and the selection by interview of a professional chief executive officer rather than yet another ghastly political appointee.
Making Bundy chief executive officer of Malta’s national broadcasting company is like taking one of the people making little plastic men off the shop-floor at the company which makes Playmobil and telling him, “You have some experience in making Playmobil men. So we’re going to make you Playmobil CEO, and you can run the company.” Is that ever going to happen in the private sector? Of course not. It doesn’t even happen in the public sector outside Malta in places where people aren’t childish, corrupt and/or nuts.
To make somebody CEO of a large company who has never so much as managed anything at all is insanity. Can you imagine John Bundy going over spreadsheets of company accounts and talking to the chief financial officer about where cuts can be made and how budgets can be redistributed, about man-hours and production costs? Well, exactly. The interesting thing is that lots of people blank out the dangers inherent in this system. They see all these individuals as just figureheads who won’t actually be doing anything, political appointees in it for the jam and it doesn’t matter if the CEO doesn’t know what a balance sheet looks like. But a CEO is not a chairman – he is the one who takes all the executive decisions in the company, including on finance and production. Bundy is not qualified for any CEO job, not just PBS in particular, and the board of directors who approved his appointment should, to use the expression which so perplexes a certain kind of Labour supporter, the Law Commissioner and a certain over-eating aide to the Prime Minister, taken out and shot.
It has come to this. During the general election campaign, Muscat went to the ridiculous extreme of promising that the general public would get to vote on public appointments from a selection of candidates who put themselves forward. He’s gone from that to appointing John Bundy CEO at PBS, the culmination so far of a long, three-year list of shocking corrupt and abusive crony choices.
If there is any outfit in the government’s remit which is crying out for a professional CEO, it is Pubic Services Broadcasting Ltd. The place is a mess. It is a mess financially, and it is an even bigger mess in terms of failing to provide the public with the required standard of public service broadcasting. And now it is going to be run by Mickey Mouse himself. No government has wanted to change the system by which the PBS CEO is appointed because apparently, the priority for every government is not that the public service broadcaster is run properly, but that the CEO is a waste of space. The previous incumbent, Anton Attard, is somebody who thinks that the PBS CEO is there to choose and coach a winning entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. It has been his fixation over the last few years, at the expense of TVM. Bundy is no different in this respect, because he too – like Jason Micallef who also wanted the job and probably still does – thinks the same way.
Standards are slipping so far on this island that you can smell the dirt and feel the funny money. It’s not hard to pick up on the sensation that Malta has been turned into a large laundry, with dirty or suspect money pouring through in the hundreds of millions, that what’s driving the economy is bad money. John Bundy’s appointment is part of this picture, because those who have a vested interest in keeping the funny money flowing have no such interest in having the public service broadcaster work as it should, particularly where the news is concerned.