It was like a bad joke and the Opposition leader tore it up in Parliament. The cynical and mocking ‘publication’ of contracts the government signed in the energy sector has turned out to be another offensive stunt, just like the censored publication of health sector contracts. Nationalist Party deputy leader Mario de Marco told a parliamentary debate on the contracts they were just carrying out an autopsy and did not even have the whole corpse to see what the government has signed months and years ago.

The redaction of the published documents was such that it was impossible to say how much energy will be purchased from Electrogas or what exactly the government has committed itself to do.

It is simply unacceptable that the government has bound itself and successive administrations to a contract that really and truly has not seen the light of day despite the theatrics, including those by Minister Within the Office of the Prime Minister, Konrad Mizzi, who would not face independent media but happily fielded questions from the State broadcaster.

Everything about the new gas- powered power station has turned out to be a sham, starting from a promise to have it completed in two years and another pledge by the Prime Minister to resign if it was not. Four years on, the government is still using the BWSC plant it once dubbed a cancer factory. The latest promise on that is that half of it will be operating on gas by next month.

There were other unexpected surprises along the way like a secret deal by the government to buy the €450 million power plant from Electrogas if the European Commission rejected a security of supply agreement they had reached. As the government rolled out its energy plans, other surprises emerged, like the €360-million government bank guarantee for Electrogas and the berthing of the huge LNG tanker inside the once picturesque Marsaxlokk Bay.

On its part, the government speaks of revolutionising the energy sector, of cleaner air, of “exciting times”. It has fulfilled its pre-electoral promise of cutting energy rates but not in the way it promised. It used the infrastructure left off by the previous administration, coupled with the interconnector project and falling oil prices. This has led the Opposition to even question the very purpose of the new power plant.

Now Dr Mizzi is saying that Enemalta has imposed a €10 million penalty on Electrogas for the late delivery of the new power station. But he did not say what delivery date that was and whether it was the same date he had promised before the election, unlikely as that may be.

However, despite the many shenanigans that offend people’s intelligence, the biggest casualty in this long stretched-out parody of good governance was Labour’s pre-election promise of transparency. All along, it has been anything but transparent. Instead, the country has witnessed a slow governmental striptease of information that, in the end, revealed nothing at all.

The impression given is that the government runs the country like it was a private enterprise, with no sense of accountability to anyone. It is a government that meets with a developer in private and signs off wide tracts of ODZ land in Żonqor, Marsascala for an American university that turns out to be, well, not American at all.

It is a style of government that people did not vote for. It is not just cynical and tongue-in-cheek but, above all, very offensive.

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