Back in 1996, the Nationalist Party had set up a massive Jumbotron outside its headquarters. This was before the advent of the giant, talking billboards which towered over City Gate in the 2008 election campaign, or even the snazzy, lit-up ones we saw during the last election campaign.
In the largely pre-social media age, when Facebook was still a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and election literature was quite primitive, the Jumbotron seemed to be the height of technological sophistication to us.
As pixelated images flickered across its giant screen, accompanied by a thumping soundtrack, we thought how much better and avant-garde the Jumbotron was, in comparison to Alfred Sant’s Cittadinmobil.
While the former leader of the Labour Party was touring the country in a sexed-up coach, the Jumbotron seemed to symbolise what the PN was offering – a hip, forward-looking and sophisticated party equipped with all the attendant technological bells and whistles.
Besides the main pro-EU/anti-EU divide, there were other distinctions between the PN and the PL. While Sant warned about the budget deficit (It even earned its own moniker as ‘Il-Hofra’), the PN contemptuously shrugged this off as doom-mongering and carried on with its ‘money no problem’ philosophy, cheerfully spending its way through election campaigns. And while Sant was going on about “barunijiet”, the PN was embracing those very same “barunijiet” (as the Labour Party is doing now – but we’ll get to that in due course).
We all know how that election turned out. The Nationalist Party got a drubbing at the polls and Sant’s Cittadinmobil chugged its way to Castille. Of course, the electorate voted Labour out of office a mere 20 months later, but I still think that the seeds of the PN’s undoing and its current malaise, were already sown back then in the Jumbotron election.
Even then, the PN had already embarked on a course of action which would bring the organisation to its knees financially-speaking and which would make its officials resort to the morally reprehensible, asking Media.Link employees to forfeit their wages for the time being.
Chief among the reasons for the PN’s quasi-bankrupt status is its insistence on embarking on over-the-top projects without sound financial foundations. Basically that means it spends money it hasn’t got.
Is no one accountable for the PN’s financial mess?
I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. There is no way that the Nationalist Party – or the Labour Party, for that matter – could finance the building of their respective headquarters and support their money haemorrhaging television stations from the proceeds of coffee mornings and their paid-up members. The proceeds from the PN’s Eurotours travel agency may put some coins in the kitty, but nowhere near the amount needed to fill the war chests needed to keep Net TV afloat and to splurge on election campaigns. Only big business and industry donors could fill in those huge financial holes.
And for a long time they did just that. Big business donors bankrolled the building of the PN’s headquarters and several campaigns. But when they decided to abandon the sinking PN ship and board the Labour Party, the PN was left practically penniless.
Which leads us to the question of whether – for the past years – the PN was actually a political party or simply a vehicle for undeclared donors to get what they wanted. In this scenario, it is quite legitimate to ask if the PN has been acting in the interests of its members or its employees, or as an indirect channel of communications and cash between donors and the government.
It’s hard to believe that the undisclosed donors donated millions of euros to the PN out of the goodness of their hearts and with no strings attached. This state of affairs served the PN well for a good number of years and explains its reticence and foot-dragging when it came to introducing laws regulating the financing of political parties.
The lack of transparency in this regard has led to a situation where it is practically impossible to ascertain whether all donations were used for their intended purpose. We have no idea that monies received were used efficiently. In fact, it seems there must have been some crazy splurging going on to saddle the party with debts reportedly amounting to some €8 million.
Simon Busuttil has assured the public that the PN will break even by the end of this month. If this comes about, we will start wondering what on earth was going on in the past, if the PN can somehow drag itself out of debt which it had accumulated over 10 years in the space of two months. Is no-one accountable for the financial mess?
If so, what is being done about it? Not much, it seems, except asking long-serving employees to give up a couple of months’ salary (or not receive it for a long time) for the good of the party, thereby confirming the view that the PN is morally – as well as financially – bankrupt.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt