When our Prime Minister was taking his oath of office just after the election, his two closest associates were ensconcing themselves in the Auberge de Castille with him.
What they did first is most revealing, not just about them but, more importantly, about Joseph Muscat. We now know, from the Panama Papers’ 11 million e-mails, that they immediately started the process of opening a complex web of secret companies and accounts in Panama and other far-off jurisdictions.
They opened three secret companies, the third’s owner’s name being so sensitive they didn’t write it in an e-mail but related it via voice on Skype.
This was the very first thing they did just after our Prime Minister took his oath of office. We know this from the e-mails sent to Mossack Fonseca by Nexia BT, the ‘financial services’ company of our Prime Minister’s close friend, Brian Tonna, who was also making himself very comfortable at the Office of the Prime Minister.
After these e-mails were revealed – something the trio at Castille would never have thought could ever happen – we expected the immediate dismissal of both the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and of the all-powerful Energy and Health Minister (whose office is also in the Auberge de Castille).
But no, nothing of the sort would happen. Muscat’s two closest associates since well before the last general election, with their secret companies and accounts in shady jurisdictions on the other side of the world for money whose origin they cannot explain, are too valuable for our Prime Minister. They would never resign, and he would never dismiss them.
They would never even be investigated under Muscat’s government, where talking on your mobile while driving is – very fairly – being punished with increasing fines, yet owning millionaire secret accounts and companies abroad makes you very valuable for our Prime Minister who would not even set in motion an investigation, let alone a resignation or dismissal.
And this is not tax evasion. Tax evasion is when you escape tax on moneys whose origin – clean and legal – you can clearly explain. But when Muscat’s two closest associates were asked where the millions they were depositing were coming from, they supplied an unbelievable tale ranging from “commissions” to “recycling”.
In the pecking of order of our Prime Minister’s values, his chief of staff, his plenipotentiary minister and their secret financial vehicles in jurisdictions the likes of Panama are very valuable indeed.
Then you have the nouveaux riches of Muscat’s administration: other new millionaires whose millions are not being made in our vibrant private sector built by our previous administration, but through secret contracts signed by the Prime Minister or his ministers.
A large coterie of cronies paid by Joe Public in hidden taxes – the latest of which on car fuel – are enjoying life to the full at our expense
A whole new ‘parastatal’ sector, really; that old-fashioned word precisely describing how you can make millions in Malta nowadays.
A land speculator from Jordan gets a large tract of virgin and cheap land in the south of the island to build a ‘university’ that strangely needs sea views and access to the shore.
An illegal petrol station gets a permit after its notorious owner meets the Prime Minister; in secret, of course. The same notorious owner gets €3 million worth in public land as ‘compensation’ after the Office of the Prime Minister suddenly decides to take over half a property he had just bought and which the government already occupies.
Our Prime Minister bails out a bankrupt coffee shop owner to the tune of €4 million, all through Muscat’s private email account.
A secret contract with a private power station obliges governments for the next 18 years to buy all the electricity its private owners produce, and at double the price we’re enjoying via the interconnector we now have with Sicily.
The interconnector the previous administration laid is part of the European electricity grid, but it will now be switched off so that the owners of our spanking new (two years late) private power station can sell their ‘power’ at double the competitive price.
The field of people most valuable to our Prime Minister is getting crowded. And much more so when you have hundreds of cronies earning huge salaries in the new industry – the only one – Muscat has created in these four years: the ‘positions of trust’ industry.
A large coterie of cronies paid by Joe Public in hidden taxes – the latest of which on car fuel – are enjoying life to the full at our expense in Muscat’s ministries. One of them we know ran up a €756 drinks bill in a hotel minibar in Dubai on what the Prime Minister says was official business.
This cronyism and its ‘fruits’ have caused the Finance Minister to present supplementary estimates because the government in 2015 overspent its approved budget by a full two per cent of GDP.
It’s becoming very crowded indeed, this pecking order of the people our Prime Minister values most. And at the other end, those he values least?
Car owners and drivers now have to pay substantially more for petrol and diesel, when the price of crude oil internationally is half what it was when Muscat’s closest associates were opening their secret accounts and companies in Panama.
In contrast, of course, to the Prime Minister who’s paying himself €70,000 until the end of this parliamentary term in ‘compensation’ for driving his own car rather than the official car every State worthy of the name procures for its Prime Minister.
At the other end of our Prime Minister’s values are most workers who have seen their wages stagnate since that notorious call on Skype, as shown by the government’s own Economic Survey which has published a study about real wages showing most wages are not even keeping up with inflation.
Type in ‘Economic Survey Malta’ in your search engine, go to page 100 and see for yourself in the following eight pages of sad reading of this study about sectoral wages based on no less than 200 collective agreements struck by unions and employers.
Least valued by our Prime Minister? Precarious workers in schemes set up by his government so that its close political associate, the General Workers’ Union, can profit out of workers’ misery. The government is paying the GWU €980 a month for each worker in its scheme (which really serves to massage the unemployment figure), but the GWU in turn is only paying these same workers the barest minimum of €728 a month. This is supposed to be a workers’ union, not a soulless capitalist.
So you get it, the pecking order of our Prime Minister’s values: Panama secret companies and accounts, ‘new’ millionaires leeching the taxpayer, hundreds of cronies and, at the other end, workers enduring stagnating wages and the barest minimum of conditions and wages, paying higher prices for the hidden taxes that go to finance our Prime Minister’s pecking order of values.