The damning report by the Auditor General on the workings of Enemalta’s fuel procurement committee enables the public to examine first-hand the maladministration, and worse, displayed under a Nationalist government in the oversight of one of Malta’s major imports amounting to several million euros a year.

It is an utter scandal to see what went on at Enemalta for so many years under the watch of former Minister Austin Gatt and former chairman Alex Tranter.

The current Energy Minister has rightly asked the police to investigate whether Enemalta’s oil procurement process between 2008 and May 2011 involved criminal conduct.

But there is an equally valid matter that must be pursued in a liberal democracy if Malta is ever to aspire to good governance.

This concerns the issue of ministerial responsibility. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility holds that Gatt was charged with formal responsibility for that department’s activities (or inactivities).

He was the minister responsible for laying down the policy on fuel procurement, but the Auditor General’s report states that no such policy framework existed throughout the period in question.

His nakedly nonchalant attitude to legitimate, public-interest questions is an affront to the concept of good governance and accountability

He was accountable to Parliament – and to his Prime Minister, and to the wider public – for what went on in his ministry. This is what the other governing convention, that of ‘individual ministerial responsibility’, is all about.

It is about carrying the can for what went on under his watch. Gatt was ultimately ‘responsible’ and ‘accountable’ for the policies he set (or didn’t set) and the actions (or omissions, or worse) taken by his fuel procurement committee using taxpayers’ money during the years he was the minister in charge of Enemalta.

Plain Austin Gatt, as he has now become – and as he likes to present himself – claims that he has nothing to say on what the Auditor General has uncovered as he is now a private citizen and no longer in politics.

But this is not an acceptable response.

Gatt is an embarrassment to his party which, thanks largely to the oil-gate scandal that broke in the run-up to the election, has found itself thrown out of power and will probably be in Opposition for at least the next 10 years.

Moreover, his nakedly nonchalant attitude to perfectly legitimate public-interest questions by the media is an affront to the whole concept of good governance and accountability.

It is also an act of disloyalty to his own party and an insult to the electorate that entrusted him with responsibility for overseeing one of the most critical areas of Malta’s administration.

Even now, there is nothing to prevent Parliament from summoning Gatt before the Public Accounts Committee to explain himself. In the UK and in the US, we have seen bankers, once the self-appointed ‘masters of the universe’, and media tycoons, such as Rupert Murdoch, hauled before Senate or parliamentary committees and reduced to apologetic shadows of their former selves.

Gatt remains answerable to Parliament and the people for his actions while in government. He must be made to explain himself.

There is no reason why this should not be done in this case and every confidence to suppose that it would have a salutary effect on standards of governance in Malta if it were.

For the Labour Government it would demonstrate that it means business when it says that it intends to root out corruption and maladministration.

For the Nationalist Party, still smarting from the scale of its defeat, it could have a cathartic effect in showing that former minister Tonio Fenech’s improvement to the oil procurement system when he took responsibility for this portfolio in 2010 was not simply a cover-up of what had happened before.

Unless the PN is prepared to ditch somebody whose actions brought it down, Gatt will continue to be a political millstone round their necks for years to come.

The fact that Fenech is now the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee will be a challenge to his own credibility. It should also add piquancy to the whole affair and enable Parliament and the public to get at the truth.

For Simon Busuttil, still struggling to establish his leadership, it will be a real test of whether his party can rise above the harm that Gatt has wrought by showing he will not tolerate such maladministration and that, where proven harm is identified, he will apologise to the taxpayer for what occurred under the previous Administration’s watch.

How Parliament – on both sides of the House – now handles the appalling administrative deficiencies in fuel procurement between 2008 and 2010 will be crucial to the kind of message about good governance which it conveys: either business as usual and a Maltese shrug of the shoulders or an absolute determination for Parliament to make an example of those that had failed the country.