A resigning matter?

At the time of going to print 3,795 people have voted in The Times' online poll. The question being posed is what course of action should be taken by Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando following the publication of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority auditor's report about Mistra.

An overwhelming majority of 78 per cent thought that he should give up his seat in parliament. Another 12.9 per cent concluded that he should apologise, while the remaining nine per cent thought he should sit tight and do nothing. Judging by the comments I hear and the conversations I have, the results are pretty indicative of what most people are thinking - namely, that they're disappointed and uncomfortable with the way things have evolved.

The JPO saga has played itself out against the backdrop of the electoral campaign when the Green Politician of the Year heard that the Labour Party would be exposing some damning secret about him. The Nationalist MP decided to take the wind out Labour's sails by pre-empting Alfred Sant's revelations (perhaps keeping in mind the public relations tenet that it is always better to publish bad news yourself, so that others don't do it for you).

On March 1, JPO published an article entitled 'Street Corner gossip'. He provided a rather sparse explanation of his involvement in the affair. All he said was that he owned a plot of land which had been rented out to others and that these others had applied for a permit to build an underground lavatory and an open-air dance floor less than two metres high. He wrote: "The application has been pending all this time and no final decision has been made. I don't even know the applicants. I have never met them". It all sounded very innocuous.

When JPO in his guise of part-time journalist parachuted into Sant's press conference at PBS demanding a show-down, many interpreted Sant's reticence to participate in the farce as cowardice. And when JPO burst into tears at a public event the halo of Nationalist martyr was lodged firmly upon his head. Nationalists took their victimised green hero to heart and support for him grew.

Sant's revelation of a lease contract signed by JPO obliging the tenant to invest hundreds of thousands of Maltese liri in specific kind of immovable property within a two-year period, got us scratching our heads about JPO's association with the project. But it was too late in the day for the information to bruise the electoral chances of the PN's environmental hero.

The publication of the Mepa auditor's report after the election was even more worrying. It stated that the DCC Board which had approved the outline application and had done so even though all relevant planning policies would never have permitted it. The area was found within a Special Area of Conservation and ecologically sensitive.

Later it transpired that the consultant who spun out the tourism spiel for the disco (so much for JPO's underground loo and open-air dance floor) was the same person who - acting in his other capacity as a consultant to the MTA - whizzed back a favourable report with the MTA's seal of approval.

Oh, and somewhere along the way, this newspaper reported that a member of the DCC Board made a statement saying that JPO had phoned up the board members incessantly asking them to facilitate the permit for Dominic Micallef (JPO's tenant).

Investigations are still underway but all across Malta there's the clinking sound of the penny dropping. JPO has not been found guilty of any criminal conduct and hopefully he will not be, but he has shown that his environmental credentials are not what they were made out to be. Some might suggest that he has been somewhat economical with the truth. Undoubtedly, his actions have proved to be greatly embarrassing for his party.

In view of this, it is not surprising that calls for his resignation came from various quarters. The Prime Minister has no authority to force a parliamentarian to give up his seat, since a parliamentary democracy such as ours is designed to elect representatives of the people and not representatives of political parties. So (barring a few exceptional reasons) the only way that a parliamentarian gets to lose his seat is if the voters abandon him at the polls or if he resigns voluntarily.

But while many think that resignation would be an honourable exit route for JPO, others are still coming up with the oddest of arguments against this. One of the main ones being put forward is that everybody is innocent until proven guilty. This is an undisputed tenet of criminal law and is applicable to everyone, even politicians. However the presumption is there to safeguard those accused of criminal acts. There are other forms of wrongdoing which might not amount to an offence but would still constitute a breach of trust of the electorate, deception and hypocritical posturing, which would warrant a resignation. A disgraced politician clinging on to his seat and squawking on about the presumption of innocence is extremely off-putting.

Another argument of eye-watering stupidity is that a Member of Parliament is only answerable to the voters who elected him, as he is their representative and no one else's. This completely ignores the fact that a parliamentarian is paid from public funds - that is from the taxes collected nationwide and not only from the specific district which the MP in question contested.

MPs have a duty to act with probity and rectitude in the nation's collective interest and not solely in the narrow parochial interests of their constituents. In the JPO scenario there's also the little matter of whether the people who voted for him would still have done so, had they known what they do now.

Yet another inane line is the infamous Bettino Craxi argument. This is something on the lines of "Yes, it might be wrong but everybody does it. As everybody's doing it, you must have some particular reason to pick on me." Craxi put forward this view forcefully in a 1992 parliamentary speech when he pointed out that since every single party in Italy has taken bribes, the Milan prosecutors must have targeted the Socialist Party for political reasons. According to this fallacious argument, the villain is not the person whose wrongdoing has been revealed, but the person making the revelations.

Expect more ridiculous anti-resignation arguments to surface in the coming days. They will just be more dispiriting examples of a pathetically partisan approach to politics where any suspicion of wrong-doing is dismissed as long as the person accused of misbehaving comes from "their" side of the political divide.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt