Isn’t it nice to see Franco Debono doing so splendidly? It was not so long ago that, plagued with illness, he struggled to keep up with his duties in Parliament. His condition had even required home visits by the Prime Minister and his wife.

Now, thank heavens, all of that is murky history. Things are going swimmingly for our man in restored health, so much so that he has been ‘entrusted’ with drafting a law on party financing.

The two main objectives will be, in Debono’s words, transparency and disclosure of donors. It seems the days of backhanders to party coffers are numbered.

Smart idea on the face of it. The brief of a democratic government is to treat its citizens fairly, giving them equal access to state resources. The problem is that citizens do not always wish to be treated fairly. On the contrary, many of them are only too happy to pay for the privilege of a priority boarding pass.

Unlike, say, in Nigeria, there is no procedural culture of bribes in Malta. I mean I’m sure bribes exist, but they’re not really something the average citizen needs in order to get things done on a daily basis. One might occasionally misplace a bottle or two of single malt but for most of us that’s as far as it goes.

Which may turn out to be of little consolation, since there are many other ways of keeping in the sovereign’s good grace. One of these is to give money to parties.

Since it lends itself to charges of indirect bribery, the practice is usually kept out of sight. This last bit is what the new law proposes to tackle; hopefully, the rest will go with it.

The rest, presumably, being laundering money by giving it to parties, mysteriously winning every tender one bids for, producing building permits like bunnies from a hat, etc.

Let’s assume the law works, i.e. that donors will be disclosed and party funding becomes transparent. Far from obvious since there are a million ways of siphoning money from A to B.

But assuming it does, can we expect it to change much? I am not myself terribly convinced, for three reasons.

First, why single out money? The two big parties in Malta can each tap into a huge pool of resources, only some of which have to do with cash.

The courting and pestering of experts by parties for free consultancy and other services is an endemic phenomenon, for example. University academics know the game very well and many have been known to play it with considerable enthusiasm.

The roots are spread out. From ‘helpers’ to ‘ħbieb tal-partit’ (friends of the party), band musicians to ‘street leaders’ (a type of spy), all provide some form of voluntary service that is not necessarily disclosed. Think two vast and partially camouflaged Salvation Armies. So why should money be thought of as a special problem?

The reasons are many. They include a deep-seated suspicion of money (‘dirty cash’) as intrinsically immoral and corrupting. It’s quite possible for a band musician to put his efforts down to unconditional love for the party. Not so for, say, a shopkeeper waving a cheque.

Besides, nothing disturbs the green-eyed monster’s light sleep like money. It’s alright, I suppose, for commoners (that malignant word ‘iż-żgħir’, used to excuse all sorts of mischief) to line up on telly with their hard-earned tenners, hoping for a sanctioning of their seafront garage. But it’s not alright for the rich contractor to pay for his own little dreams. Pure politics of envy, in other words.

Second, should disclosure be based on absolute or relative amounts? The Christian model of charity, for example, seems to prefer the latter.

We all know the story of the widow who gave away her last penny – it was the relative not the absolute amount that mattered. If parties went by that morality, the person on a low salary who gave away a tenner would be chief suspect under the new law.

Not that leaving relativity aside would help. When party financing was discussed by the Galdes Commission in 1995, the three major parties had disagreed on the threshold above which donors would be made public. It seems they also had different views on the threshold above which donations would be illegal.

It’s all very well for Debono to tell us not to get bogged down by thresholds and amounts. Fact is that amounts – be they absolute or relative – are the crucial piece of the puzzle here. I don’t quite see the three parties reaching a consensus on this one, for rather obvious reasons.

There is a third argument against over-optimism. The question is: What to do with the (public) information that, say, a leading contractor is also a major donor? Would that preclude them from submitting tenders? Would it render them ineligible for sanctioning?

The answers to these last two questions must certainly be in the negative. Which leaves us with a bit of a non-starter that goes as follows: Transparency and disclosure are simply warning lights for us to be extra vigilant.

That’s a non-starter for many reasons, not least because it will always be very hard to pin down corruption on charges of ‘influence’. Donations may buy one influence in principle, but how does one establish its outcomes in practice? How does one quantify the sovereign’s grace and bounty?

Given these conundrums, should we therefore ask Debono to take a holiday? Not necessarily. My point is not that the proposed legislation is useless, but that we should not expect too much of it.

I for one like the principle of transparent party financing. In practice, however, I won’t hold my breath for the dawn of a new Age of Fairness.

mafalzon@hotmail.com