A most telling remark made at the leaders’ debate at the University was that, despite multiple accusations of corruption, not one single politician spent a day in prison for corruption in 53 years since Independence.
This suggests that either the accusations were all, without any exception, without foundation and that, contrary to perception, the country is squeaky clean or that the country’s political and institutional checks and balances have not worked in the way they are meant to.
It does not take any particular intelligence to come to the second conclusion. It will be brave for any political leader, in Malta or anywhere else, to promise the elimination of corruption. No sane politician will do this. What can be done is to ensure, in so far as it is humanly possible, that the institutional structures in place to check corruption do work as they are intended to, as they, in fact, did in 2009 when the chief justice was found guilty of taking bribes. The judiciary has still to fully recover from that and other sleaze that hit the law courts in subsequent years.
Kickback allegations in the purchase of oil for the State energy corporation towards the end of the last administration were, of course, serious but they pale almost into insignificance compared to what has been happening over the past four years of Joseph Muscat’s administration. There has been no administration that has been mired in so much sleaze as this one.
Indeed, this government has taken sleaze up to a level undreamt of at any time before. As politicians from the two main parties trade charges against each other with sheer abandon, what stands out is not the audacity that some show in the telling of their rivals’ misdemeanors but the extent to which Dr Muscat has chosen to lower the bar to what is morally acceptable. This is the sad legacy he leaves behind, a legacy that is dragging Malta’s name to the gutter.
The Labour leader’s greatest mistake was when he kept by his side two aides who were found to have had undeclared offshore companies in Panama. His decision makes him morally guilty of their misdeed, which, in this case, was the non-declaration of an offshore company. Subsequent revelations, including the findings of the government’s anti-money-laundering agency, were simply damning.
More troubling for the country is that his indifferent attitude to the holding of offshore companies and the evident failure of regulators and the police make Malta’s defence of its tax regime weak.
Labour has lost the meaning of rectitude.
If Dr Muscat is prepared to resign, as he says he would if the magisterial inquiry finds that his name, or that of his wife, is linked to an offshore company, why did he not immediately ask for the resignation of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri? The contradiction is palpable.
Dr Muscat has put himself in a dilemma that will not go away whatever the result of the inquiries or, even, of the general election.
This election is not about which party plans to remove overhead cables from cluttered streets or about which party is to cut income tax most but about the restoration of the rule of law and the right moral standards.