Joseph Muscat never struck me as a man of principle. Today, I’m certainly not alone in thinking that. Barely two years in government, he is a Prime Minister battered by political scandals. In the run-up to the 2013 general election, Muscat assured us that Labour had turned the page. He meant it, he kept his word – Labour has turned the page backwards.

In 2013, few would have pictured the scandals, arriving one after the other, in the first few years of a Labour government – after nearly 25 years in the political wilderness. Today, we have a pile-up of political scandals fuelled by Muscat and his men and women in Cabinet. Their complicity in what is happening is painful.

But what exactly is happening in the government? That is a question I’m often asked, not least by disgruntled Labour Party supporters and disgusted middle-of-the road voters.

It’s no rocket science: a leopard can’t change its spots. What we have today is old Labour – at its best.

The Gaffarena scandal is just the tip of the iceberg but an eye-opener, if there was ever need for one, that the Muscat government has lost all sense of shame. Gaffarena took €1.65 million in cash and public land which he personally selected.

Joseph Muscat thinks and acts as if he were invincible

Muscat made Gaffarena a millionaire, overnight, in a fast-track expropriation, bereft of any public purpose, with his government’s blessings.

Muscat has a habit of making his chosen few filthy rich overnight.

The Café Premier scandal is a case in point. The recent obscene expropriation in Gozo, where €460,000 were dished out for a mere 93 square metres of property the government does not need and which had been on the market for sale at a much lower price for ages to no avail, makes revolting reading.

Make no mistake, this is institutionalised corruption at its best.

The buck stops with the Prime Minister. Prime ministers in European democracies have resigned over matters which are far less serious than the Gaffarena, or the Café Premier, or the Gaffarena-Zammit or the shady deals with the Azeri government. Muscat would have none of that. He thinks and acts as if he were invincible. He’s far too busy accommodating his network of friends.

More recently, he started training his guns with a vengeance at me. Castille leaked snippets of a file of the Land Department in a despicable attempt to tarnish my reputation. I know the ferreting of such files for devious ends has been ongoing for months now.

A few days ago, I challenged the Prime Minister to publish the entire file in question – pertaining to compensation paid in 2012 – for the Mtaħleb land snatched by Muscat’s mentor, the late prime minister Dom Mintoff, in 1974 in the same fashion of the Muscat administration: ‘I am the emperor therefore I do what I please’. In 1974, the government seized over 8,600 square metres of privately-owned land in Mtaħleb and did not pay a dime. Not a mere ‘passageway’, as Labour lied last week.

I have already stated that €400,000 for eight tumoli of land is fair and reasonable when one considers that half that amount was the interest due since 1974, at the annual rate of 2.5 per cent (instead of the five per cent legally due) and that one tumolo of land today costs about €55,000.

Muscat and Labour, in sickening fashion, are insulting thousands of landowners whose land Mintoff had expropriated, but didn’t pay for, in the 1970s and 1980s.

The millions of euros he gave the Labour Party (€10 million for the Australia Hall); to the Café Premier owners (€4.2 million) and to Marco Gaffarena (€3.5 million) should have been given to these long-suffering landowners.

To add insult to injury, Castille leaked part of a file to depict as robbers and swindlers landowners who had suffered decades of injustice and whom a Nationalist Government I served under had started compensating. Witness the hundreds of families who, during the last legislature, became owners for the first time of their homes built on plots Labour had snatched from others.

In ordinary circumstances, I would advise the Prime Minister that when in a hole he should stop digging. But these are no ordinary circumstances.

We are lumped with a Prime Minister who governs the country with the same mentality of a spin reporter – his background. We have a Prime Minister who behaves as though government (people’s) land was his own back yard and taxpayers’ money his bank account.

People deserve better. But then I know that, unfortunately, the Prime Minister does not care. Make no mistake, the Opposition shall leave no stone unturned in the search for truth and shall continue to hold him accountable for his actions.

Jason Azzopardi is shadow minister for citizens’ rights, justice and democracy.

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