See the text, not the spin

Motions tabled in Parliament are to be gauged strictly on what they actually say rather than on the resultant spin. The same applies to the recent vote of no confidence in Richard Cachia Caruana.

… a vote of no confidence was required to restore the supremacy of Parliament- Leo Brincat

At no stage did the motion itself ever mention Partnership for Peace, the specific year 2004, treason, or Wikileaks. All it boiled down was whether Parliament had been bypassed or not and whether there could have been instances when foreign governments might have been kept in the loop ahead of the country’s Administration.

Just to put the record straight, the motion had nothing to do with the permanent representative’s competence; the same way that the motion on former minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici had nothing to do with his personal integrity. Ironically, when Parliament, in its majority, expressed no confidence in the way Dr Mifsud Bonnici “ran the show” some had argued that, if anything, we should have put the bureaucrats in the dock.

This time round, political expediency dictated otherwise.

What is totally unacceptable is that some people tend to believe that the word permanent representative implicitly suggests an indefinite degree of permanency based on near irreplaceability of the person concerned.

To classify Mr Cachia Caruana as a civil servant, as most apologists did, is rich indeed. He was and remains a political appointee, who, apart from being a permanent rep, is also an adviser to the Prime Minister, runs the EU secretariat based at the Office of the Prime Minister, attends Cabinet meetings, chairs an inter-ministerial committee on EU affairs and is also by his own definition a top strategist of the Nationalist Party.

I challenge anyone to say who in the civil service receives the same ministerial termination facility as he is entitled to contractually.

Although some conveniently dismissed my probing about his financial package of remuneration as irrelevant to the whole issue, my insistence will hopefully be justified if and when the whole package is revealed in its entirety. We need to ascertain whether he, who is often rightly or wrongly considered to be the power behind the throne, is financially rewarded in a disproportionate manner, as an actual power behind the throne. Time will tell, but the Prime Minister’s evasiveness on the issue tends to imply that we seem to have hit the nail on the head.

All the talk that the citizens will be the ones to suffer as a result of what has unfolded in the past days shows total disregard for Parliament’s supremacy: the whole concept of parliamentary scrutiny, transparency and good governance.

If Lawrence Gonzi never bothered to groom someone to take over Mr Cachia Caruana’s role when the need arises, this could either imply resistance on the permanent representative’s part or else that this government, which is too busy fire fighting its way through daily battles for its own political survival, never bothered to get down to serious succession planning among the highly capable members of the Maltese civil service it could have drawn on.

For some reason or other, the media simply ignored the following point I made during both in Committee and in plenary.

I pointed out that there was a particular instance according to Wikileaks where, regardless of the issue at stake, the uppermost US Embassy officials in Malta were informed by their own official US sources in Brussels that “he (Mr Cachia Caruana) would be advocating a particular approach to Valletta”.

If what they said is correct, this is indeed worrying since to advocate goes far beyond merely expressing an opinion. It rather implies lobbying, recommending and/or encouraging government to do so.

If it transpires, as the memo suggests, that a foreign government could have been made privy by a senior Maltese diplomat of any sensitive issue or stand before his own government had even yet formally approved his strong recommendation, that, then, made a bad situation worse.

The timelines that transpired in the correspondence trickled down by the Prime Minister suggest that, while this memo was written on October 11, 2004 and based on discussions held by the Americans with the Malta side the day before, even though “Valletta’ received the suggestion on the same day, Cabinet did not formally approve the advocated recommendation until three days later – on November 12, 2004.

In total disregard of his minister’s recommendation – by his own admission – Mr Cachia Caruana failed to honour his commitment to brief the House Committee on European Affairs twice a year on every change of EU presidency. This was the same minister who Wikileaks had alleged had been often kept out of the loop on key matters.

In Mr Cachia Caruana’s statement under oath, although he was defined as a prime problem solver by the Prime Minister, contrary to a leading foreign Malta-based ambassador, he claimed that he only came to learn of Malta’s decision to rejoin PfP after the 2008 election.

These arguments, backed by documents, suggest that, in our opinion, Parliament was indeed by-passed and kept in the dark and that a vote of no confidence was required to restore the supremacy of Parliament.

Brincat.leo@gmail.com

The author is opposition spokesman for the environment, sustainable development and climate change.