What a sneak this Labour government has turned out to be, and such a spoilsport too. If only government ministers took a joint vacation and left these islands in peace for some time, then some of us would be able to get some sleep.
Instead they stayed around to stun the country with a €360 million guarantee for a power station we don’t need, to relaunch a ragtag American university that’s actually Jordanian, and finally to let slip that developments within hospital grounds will no longer require planning permission.
They saved all this for the feast of Santa Maria, giving a new twist to the term revelation because surely, all these announcements came together by divine coincidence. Our Prime Minister is such a glowing inspiration these days. If only we knew what he were up to.
A legal notice published on the eve of Santa Maria now excludes any hospital-related development from the need of a planning permission. Environment groups have expressed outrage, but they miss the point.
This has nothing to do with the environment or with impact assessments; it’s about backroom negotiations with big business that Labour in government has turned into a nefarious art.
The legal amendment to planning laws obviously caters for the €200 million investment the government claims will be coming to Malta when it gives away for 30 years St Luke’s Hospital, Karen Grech Hospital and the Gozo Hospital to Singaporean firm Vitals Global Health Care.
Vitals was one of three bidders to submit a proposal following a government call in March. It is owned by the Oxley Group, which blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia had predicted would win the tender months before. That she got it right is a pure coincidence of course. We are governed by coincidences.
Treating the country like a fiefdom is to dismantle the very structures of democratic government and turn Malta into a banana republic
The scary thing about this legal notice is that it shows a pattern in Labour’s negotiating methods. In the same way that the €360 million guarantee (that’s in euros not geometric degrees which leave us where we started) was hoisted upon the country, and in the same way that the pseudo university comes complete with sea views, ODZ land and a downward revision of university standards, the Vitals group investment will come at a price. The one condition to come to light so far is a free hand at redeveloping the hospital sites unhindered by the planning laws the rest of the country has to abide by.
There may be other arrangements with Oxley but we shall have to wait to find out because all agreements reached by this government are secret. All that can be said at this stage is that if the agreement reached with Oxley is anything like the Jordanian university deal, we’re in for another roller coaster ride until the Prime Minister admits once again that “things could have been handled better”.
• Apparently, when this government meets behind closed doors, everything is up for negotiation, everything is on the table because everything has a price for Labour, just like a Maltese passport.
There are no standards that investors are expected to meet, be they planning laws or university levels.
All laws are null and void at discussion stage because things can always be arranged with Labour, through legal notices sneaked in until someone spots them accidentally.
That’s how this country nearly didn’t find out that Shanghai Electric had gotten vast tracts of land in Għaxaq, Marsaxlokk and Marsa in return for buying a bankrupt energy company. In this case too there was a legal notice that removed the need for Parliament to debate any Enemalta land transfers.
Health and Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi, who also assured us there was no done deal with the Oxley Group, said the 11 transfers of land were no secret because the information was always there to see at the Land Registry.
Apparently he thinks that people regularly pop over to the Land Registry for a coffee and to see what’s the latest land swindle the government is up to. Pity that no registry keeps records of ministers’ overseas visits. That way we would find out what Mizzi has been up to in Azerbaijan: for other meetings, no doubt.
The land donations were a sweetener agreed to behind closed doors, without which the deal with Shanghai Electric may not have gotten through.
Somehow, each time Labour emerges from those meetings it seems like it was walkover for the ‘investor’, so long as Prime Minister Joseph Muscat gets to boast of attracting investment. No wonder Muscat took just five minutes to convince that Jordanian real estate developer to open a university here. He must have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The sad tragedy of it all is that this means there are no standards or rules anymore in this country because everything is negotiable if you have a chequebook.
Labour runs Malta like a fiefdom from the Middle Ages. Sometimes it feels a bit like we’re living inside the Wizard of Id cartoon strip that appears in the Pursuits pages of this newspaper. Once the king was asked what the people of Id were called as a nation. Idiots, he replied.
• Muscat’s fingerprints must be all over these dubious projects, as only that would explain why he willingly fronts them like they were his.
The Jordanian real estate developer is reported to be happy with the backroom arrangements he reached with the government on locating part of the university at Dock 1 (he knows a prime tourist site when he sees one). Lost somewhere in some media reports is a detail that the government itself will be funding the restoration of the old buildings.
We know the Jordanian gentleman is happy only because the Prime Minister told us when he went to tour the place. There was no one from the company around, apparently. They left it all up to Muscat.
In no self-respecting country would a Prime Minister personally make a presentation of a private sector project. The Prime Minister could choose to sit among the audience and gloat as investors unveil their grandiose plans and sell them to the country. But Muscat sells the project for them himself. It’s like he told the Jordanian land speculator: “Leave it to me, I’ll sell it for you.”
And sadly, he quite succeeds.
Muscat may be choosing to add his face to these projects because for some incomprehensible reason, survey findings still place him at the top of the polls. His presence and endorsement adds credibility to the incredible in this Kingdom of Id.
Treating the country like a fiefdom is to dismantle the very structures of democratic government and turn Malta into a banana republic.
On the morrow of Santa Maria, the Office of the Prime Minister was enlightened to issue a statement saying that the Prime Minister and Mrs Muscat had sent a Maltese laced blanket to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The gift on ‘behalf of Malta’ was to mark the occasion of the christening of Princess Charlotte.
Evidently this country unknowingly has a royal family installed at Castille, because otherwise how can one explain the Department of Information statement where it said that: “Mrs Muscat commissioned the lace work for Princess Charlotte’s summer blanket to a qualified lace teacher.”
It is difficult to understand by what authority Mrs Muscat, who holds no offpublic office, could commission anyone to make a blanket out of “fine pure silk which was ordered from silk manufacturers in the UK”. And yet she did.
It’s official then, we’ve really gone banana.