The tourism minister – ED ZL, as he wished to be known in one of his more playful moods on Facebook, before he was mocked to kingdom come – is in a very bitchy mood right now. And Robert Arrigo, the Opposition spokesman for small businesses and the self-employed, has borne the brunt of it. “Air Malta isn’t there to save Robert Arrigo’s hotels and travel agency,” the minister said, in the gracious manner which we have come to associate with the Taghna Lkoll Cabinet. “The decisions I take for Air Malta are to save jobs, not his business.” I paraphrased a little, but there you have the gist of it.
Arrigo had committed the cardinal sin of putting Zammit Lewis under a little more pressure than he is feeling already, by saying that Malta’s tourism industry is dependent on Air Malta, so they had better get the matter sorted. Robert Arrigo did not react with a statement of his own, though quite frankly, he should have, because Zammit Lewis is getting a little too bloated for his own good. Instead, he posted a couple of sentences beneath this newspaper’s report on the matter: “I own two hotels, the St Julian’s Bay and the Europa. Both are leased long term to third parties, and the lease expires in 2025. The minister is ill advised, or this just confirms his incompetence.”
Further down, in response to somebody who commented on the same board, he wrote: “My incoming agency supplies clients to all hotels plus connected services like guides, coaches, restaurants, food importing agents, laundries etc. Thousands of jobs. He obviously does not care.”
No, he doesn’t care. All you have to do is look at him, and examine how very much larger he has grown in the last four years to see that what he cares about mostly is the canapé tray and restaurant menus. The man must be eating his way through every one of the Malta Tourism Authority’s clients and the entire Institute of Tourism Studies kitchen.
But what we really should be looking at here is why Zammit Lewis was so upset. It wasn’t simply because Robert Arrigo got on his nerves. It was because Arrigo mentioned Louis Grech and clearly touched a very sore spot. Arrigo mentioned how glad he was that Grech – who is the deputy prime minister (I feel I have to remind you about this from time to time) – has been delegated to deal with the crisis at the national airline, and for this purpose he has pulled a man called Joe Capello out of the fossil cabinet. Grech and Capello were chairman and CEO of Air Malta for many years, and one supposes that the Prime Minister hopes that you can fix the future with the tools of the past. Robert Arrigo seems to believe the same thing, but we’ll let that go for now. The point here is that this decision has obviously upset Edward Zammit Lewis, which was why he reacted so touchily to Arrigo’s praise of the decision to make Grech responsible for sorting out Air Malta.
“I am still politically responsible for Air Malta,” Zammit Lewis said, pointedly. Perhaps, as the national airline has not been removed from the tourism portfolio. But it’s difficult to see how those two are going to work things out between them without making an even greater catastrophe of Air Malta than they have done already. Both Louis Grech and Edward Zammit Lewis sit in the Cabinet of government, and Grech is actually the deputy prime minister. But Zammit Lewis is “politically responsible” for the airline and Grech is “responsible for sorting it out”, which means he is politically and factually responsible too.
Something tells me that with those two ripping each other’s hair out over who ‘owns’ Air Malta, the airline is going to sink even further down the tubes than it has done already. Zammit Lewis doesn’t understand that no, actually it isn’t all about jobs – that it is, like Arrigo said, about making sure that the airline survives and functions efficiently without losing many more millions. People will find jobs here or there, and this government has said that it is going to distribute them (irresponsibly) elsewhere on the state payroll anyway. But if Air Malta collapses into bankruptcy, which it should have done a while ago now, then that’s that. No jobs, and no airline either. And neither ED ZL nor Louis Grech is going to be the most popular boy on the block. I rather suspect that the cunning Grech is going to be quite happy to let ED ZL assume “political responsibility” for it all, at least in the public eye. Then he will get to carry the can alone while the other one saunters off to carry on with his private business building blocks of flats.