It must have taken a great deal of political courage for the Justice Minister to make the kind of statements about governance, responsibility and transparency he made in an article in The Sunday Times of Malta on August 16.
Either that or he must be suffering from a strong bout of political amnesia, or naivety, for it is doubtful if there has ever been an administration that has floundered so much on governance as the present Labour government over the first half of its legislature.
He grounded his argument on what he called as the better structures for better governance that the government had managed to put up in the short time it has been in power. Owen Bonnici said the laws enacted in this regard were testimony of their intentions. This may very well be so, but Dr Bonnici ought to know that what counts most are not intentions but what is actually done on the ground. It is on that score, and on that score alone, that his government, like all governments, will be judged, not on intentions.
He had the temerity to claim that the government has been a catalyst for change for the better to increase transparency and political responsibility. Anyone living in Malta during the time Labour has been in power would immediately reply “anything but”.
Lack of transparency and of accountability has in fact become the hallmark of this administration, as shown by the string of cases in which the government has been a party to, such as, for example, in that of the building of the gas-fired power station.
The government has been consistently refusing to lay all its cards on the table and publish the documentation demanded by the Opposition. The government has already received a drubbing from the National Audit Office, the first over the bailout of a company holding the Café Premiere lease and thesecond over an oil hedging agreement with a company in Azerbaijan.
In the first case, the Audit Office said the deal detracted from the prudence expected in disbursements of the magnitude involved. The absence of documentation substantiating the reasons for the deal was a significant shortcoming.
In that deal, the government did not even involve, from the start, the department that should have been charged with taking care of the matter in the first place. “Poor governance” was given as “a factor central to the shortcoming of not involving the government property department”.
In the second case, that of the hedging agreement with the Azerbaijan company, the NAO expressed reservations over how Enemalta hedged oil consignments worth millions of euros following “ministerial directions”. The Auditor said: “Documentation reviewed by this office, which solely focused on the setting oftargets, failed to provide a comprehensive account of the AFC’s (Advisory and Finance Committee) sourcing of final approval and the subsequent placement of order with Socar Trading SA. Minutes of the Petroleum Committee meeting dated April 3, 2014 indicated that the deal with Socar had been concluded following ‘ministerial direction’.”
The cherry on the cake is the Gaffarena land deal, which is also being investigated by the Audit Office. Under this deal, the government paid €1.65 million in land and cash for half ownership of a property that Marco Gaffarena bought for a fraction of the price just weeks earlier.
And there is now yet another case, that of the planned expropriation of Palazzo Verdelin, in Valletta.
The government may very well be putting up structures for better governance, however, the record shows that the change on the ground has been for the worse, not for the better.