Last Sunday, newspaper reports confirmed what we suspected all along – that the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party haven’t been paying water and electricity bills for yonks.

Between them they’ve managed to run up a utilities bill of €2.5 million, with the PN owing the lion’s share of the amount – €1.9 million and the Labour Party being responsible for the remaining €600,000.

After the initial oohing and aahing over the outstanding debt due to ARMS (the surprise is only about the amount and not the fact that both parties were scrunching up their ARMS bills and using them as homemade footballs), there are some important questions which come to mind.

First – why were two major users of water and electricity allowed to get away without paying substantial instalments of their utilities bills for so long?

Those bills must have been run up over a number of years and not weeks or even months.

So while those law-abiding citizens (the ones who weren’t having their smart meters tampered with) were putting aside money to pay the bills, the two main political parties were blithely ignoring them.

This means that both the Labour and PN parties were benefitting from preferential treatment.

While every ordinary Joe pays up, while numerous NGOs scrimp and save to do so punctually and while we are at the receiving end of exhortations from the government to switch off the lights and to turn off the taps while brushing our teeth, the PL and the PN were blithely ignoring their legal obligations and their civic duty.

But that’s not the worst of it. With such a big hole in Enemalta’s finances, you have to wonder why its debt-collecting division (or that of its successor ARMS Ltd) didn’t get down to doing what it was set up to do – namely collect monies due from energy consumers.

Why were two major users of water and electricity [PN and PL] allowed to get away without paying substantial instalments of their utilities bills for so long?

It could have started by collecting the €2.5 million due by these mega-debtors.

Granted – it wouldn’t have nixed its deficit – but collecting these large amounts makes more sense economically and resource-wise than hounding some minor sports club to pay up a couple of hundred euros.

So I don’t blame people from reaching the obvious conclusion – that there was no serious attempt to collect these dues because of some political instruction which made it clear – either directly or indirectly – that the debt collectors should go easy on the PL and PN.

This kind of political intervention would not be unheard of in Malta. A former director of Mepa once admitted that there was a list of enforcement orders which they were told to ignore.

The impression that this preferential treatment of the PL and the PN is government/politically sanctioned is the way that the government-controlled ARMS fought tooth and nail against disclosing the whopping amounts due by the major parties citing customer confidentiality. This is the usual stonewalling response given to conceal cock-ups.

In countries with even minimal standards of good governance and decent public administration, this would be a major scandal.

Instead, we have a situation where the surreal becomes the norm and where a cash-strapped entity such as Enemalta lets two major debtors off the hook – basically because one of them was the party in government and the other was the government-in-waiting.

Now the Prime Minister has stated the obvious – that nobody is exempt from paying their dues. That was always the case. But this revelation has eroded the moral authority of the government to exact those dues.

After all – who can blame the man in the street from wanting to benefit from the same generous terms as the PL and the PN?

Payment on the never never or when caught out by the media?

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt