People are losing faith in politicians and are growing tired of politics. That feeling is justified, and the political events certainly did nothing to diminish it.

The claim that the db Group, which has been granted a concession to turn a piece of prime real estate in Paceville into luxury apartments, a shopping mall and a hotel, was paying the salaries of two senior PN officials is shocking.

Of course, the PN has denied the claim, insisting that a large part of the sum it received, over €70,000, was for the purchase of commercial services by the hotel group. It says that the actual donation only amounted to €3,500. The PL has also admitted to receiving a donation from the same group.

One needs to properly assess what exactly both sides are claiming. In simple terms, the PN is saying that it issued invoices for advertising/services it rendered to dbGroup and once the company accepted those invoices and posted them in their accounts as an expense it cannot now claim that such were donations. On the other hand, the PN needs to demonstrate details of what it sold to db group for €70,000, be it airtime, productions or advertorials. If it doesn’t do so than the Prime Minister’s claim that such invoices were fake is legitimate.

Simon Busuttil himself insisted this week that political parties cannot survive without donations from the business world. Therein lies the problem. People cannot trust politicians to be impartial with regard to businessmen if the same businessmen contribute to the party coffers. No matter how small the donations may be. Accepting donations from private business may not necessarily amount to a bribe, but it may well be perceived as such. One hopes that the Commission set up by the PN leader and headed by Judge Giovanni Bonello will shed some light on a possible way forward, and that any plausible solutions will be taken up by both parties not just the PN.

There are, of course, other reasons why distrust in politicians is growing. Prime parcels of public land are being given away to private business not by way of the more desirable parliamentary resolution. The ITS deal is a case in point.

Conflicts of interest, it seems, have become the order of the day. The most recent case is Mario de Marco’s involvement in the ITS transfer deal, which is under fire by his own party. There were other cases in both parties, of course. These included the citizenship-for-sale scheme, which the PN criticized so much. It later turned out that some of its MPs and officials were, through their legal companies, offering the service. In another recent case, Parliamentary Secretary Deborah Schembri appointed architect Robert Musumeci to work on her private residence, when he is a government consultant falling under her own portfolio.  

Another major source of erosion of public trust is the shady deals negotiated by our governments. A classic example is the 18-year power purchase agreement negotiated by Konrad Mizzi. The government recently boasted that it had published all the contracts pertaining to the power station, including the one mentioned above, but all the juicy bits were blacked out. In effect, the government told us nothing – all the important questions remain unanswered.

Perhaps the biggest trust-buster of them all is the involvement by a Maltese minister in the Panama Papers. People expected Joseph Muscat to sack Mizzi on the spot but what the minister got was a slap on the wrist and nothing else. Two iSurveys commissioned by this newsroom revealed public sentiment that Konrad Mizzi had to be scaked. Several protests down the line, Konrad Mizzi still represents Malta on the energy sector in the EU.

Asked, some days back, if the Panama story was now closed, Dr Muscat said it was up to the people  to decide.

The problem is that people often feel, when an election is looming, that the choice is between two evils – the trick is to choose the lesser one. Well, Malta will head to the polls in around a years’ time and it is high time for both the PN and the PL to aim higher and strive to become the better of two goods.