It was not the warmest of welcomes and he had only two minutes to speak. Opposition leader Simon Busuttil, who once was the face of the join-the-EU campaign, told the European Commission in Malta at the start of the country’s presidency of the European Council that people were annoyed with it.
“We are disappointed because the Commission is not speaking about things that people care about. Corruption, for instance,” he told European commissioners during a special parliamentary sitting.
The Commission’s visit coincided, as far as coincidences go, with its approval of the gas-fired power plant in Delimara and the government’s agreement with its operators Electrogas. And if that was not insensitive enough to public sentiment, the Commission’s vice president went to Delimara with former energy minister Konrad Mizzi to celebrate a project that is two years behind schedule and due to start operating, some say appropriately, on April 1.
Dr Busuttil’s clear disappointment in the Commission stems from the scandal involving Dr Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and their secret companies in Panama.
“We have not seen anything coming out from the European Commission about this,” Dr Busuttil said. “Here you are today and you seem to have nothing to say about it. This is something that is very disappointing for the Maltese people. And I am being quite diplomatic. I think a lot of people are angry.”
He accepted that the scandal may be considered an internal affair but wondered whether it was acceptable for Brussels that a minister would have a secret company in Panama and that the Commission’s vice president held a press conference with a “disgraced minister”. This is what made people lose trust in the EU and led to situations like Brexit, he said.
Not all of the EU has taken the same approach as the Commission. The European Parliament, being fundamentally different from the Commission on grounds that it is elected, will be sending a delegation to Malta next month on the Panama Papers scandal. By another coincidence, of course, the elusive financial audit of Dr Mizzi’s affairs may be published around the same time.
Unlike the Commission, MEPs keep raising questions about the Panama accounts, have objected to Malta’s nominations to the Court of Auditors because of those accounts and have not taken nicely to the sale of Maltese passports.
When, 13 years ago, this country voted to join the EU, people looked up to the EU as a standard to aspire for. Among other reasons, they voted to join because they wanted a quality leap in their governance. They believed that membership would mean the country would never again return to the excesses of the Labour Party of the 1970s and 1980s.
The Maltese people also believed that, through EU membership, governments would have to meet quality standards and introduce regulations that would otherwise never see the light of day in Malta. Reality has not been as simple as that.
The hunting issue was not solved through the EU. The sale of Maltese (European) passports, to the disgust of many, was not stopped by the EU. And, again, nothing was done on the Panama scandal.
There is one lesson to be drawn from this, that it is useless to wait for someone else to do what is, after all, Malta’s responsibility. The Panama scandal can be said to be everybody’s problem but nobody will do the job for us. It is up to Malta to solve the problem and on its own.