€1.6 million and only half way there. Photo: Jason Borg

Some guys have all the luck, don’t they? For just half a property in Valletta, one lucky chap has pocketed around €1.6 million in cash and properties in Ta’ Kandja, White Rocks, Żebbuġ, Ħandaq and Sliema. And that’s a conservative estimate because the figures are truly confusing.

I owned a property in Valletta once, all of it, and all I got for it was a measly Lm13,500 (€31,000), although that was long ago.

I suppose one can put it down to business acumen, or the lack of it, but wait! I didn’t sell it to the government, I wasn’t paid out of taxpayer money but from someone’s hard-earned cash, and he negotiated hard.

Mark Gaffarena got his money for half a property in Old Mint Street from my taxes. The Labour government that now embraces capitalism of the worst kind – the communist Chinese version – has a lot to answer for what exactly it is doing with our money.

Taxes are not there for Labour to dispose of as it pleases.

Taxpayer money is held by the government in trust and with the sole purpose of applying it for the common good. That’s the one justification of taxation. What’s the common good in half a property and, what’s more, what is it going to cost us to buy the other half? More importantly, why?

When the Café Premier scandal exploded a few months ago, costing taxpayers €4.2 million to buy something that already belonged to the government, an increasingly aloof Prime Minister had said that he had learned a ‘procedural lesson’.

He was still new at the job when that deal was struck, you see, and although he had met the director of Café Premier before the election, they had not discussed how the government was to buy back a lease that was not being paid. That all happened after the election – very, very soon after.

Following a very damning report from the National Audit Office, the Office of the Prime Minister had said that an internal working group was reviewing processes to avoid “similar controversies”.

Well, that working group really has its work cut out for it now.

When first confronted with the Gaffarena scandal, the Prime Minister denied any involvement in a deal for which he is directly political responsible. He said: “I am informed that all negotiations and valuations were carried out solely by the Land Department.”

So, faceless and nameless people at the Land Department have allowed a man to purchase a share of a building they apparently also wanted for €140,000 and sell it to them some months later for €822,500. These people have their salaries paid for from our taxes and pay the bills they incur from our taxes. Let’s hope these people don’t get paid performance bonuses too.

In his initial reaction to the scandal, the Prime Minister did say that he “welcomes any scrutiny”, but then did nothing about it, although he is the most powerful man on the island.

Having found a robust economy, a Labour government has so far turned out to be a two-year orgy of greed

Next day, Land Parliamentary Secretary Michael Falzon called a press conference to ‘put people’s minds at rest’. He did anything but that. He insisted there was no political interference and that everything was done according to the law regulating government expropriation. If that is true, then he surely should be thinking of changing that law fast because taxpayers are always getting the raw end of the deal.

According to Falzon, the reason why this scandal made headlines was because of the Gaffarena surname. That statement was offensive. The Gaffarena family was at the centre of a controversy involving an illegal petrol station in Qormi, which was sanctioned by the planning authority soon after Labour came to office.

Falzon is responsible for the planning authority. Also, the name Gaffarena goes much further than that.

Back in the Golden Years of Labour, one Martin Gaffarena was framed by the police (not an unusual thing then) and accused of planting a bomb outside the Safi Labour club in 1986. He was acquitted of course, as it emerged that a senior police officer had planted his fingerprints on the bomb. That was Labour for you.

It is no surprise that Parliamentary Secretary Falzon came out in the defence of the Gaffarena deal because his neck is on the line.

It was he who approved the deal on behalf of the government. He is politically responsible and this scandal will not go away.

After Café Premier, the government can no longer fall back upon the lame excuse of inexperience or blame the Nationalists. This is a full-blown Labour scandal and someone must answer.

As more and more details of the Gaffarena deal emerged in this newspaper, in a pathetic bid to distract people, the government continued with its efforts to wring every possible political mileage from the faulty concrete at Mater Dei Hospital. The solution there is quite simple really, if they stop the theatrics. Find out who supplied the faulty concrete, who certified it, sue them and wring back out of them every taxpayer cent paid for faulty work.

Labour is not interested in that of course, it is not interested in bringing back wasted taxpayer money because there is always more where that came from. It is only interested in political scandal because only by continuing to taint the Nationalists in opposition does it stand a chance of ever winning the next election.

Labour’s performance in government is abysmal. The only people who may disagree with that statement, apart from the usual leeches, are the gay lobby, but even they will soon come round to realise that they have been taken for a ride, that it was all lip service done in return for their sincere votes.

They were promised tolerance and acceptance but there is a limit to Labour tolerance. Ask those university academics who were all afraid to speak out openly against the lowering of university standards in Malta. They appear to know better what Labour intolerance can come to. You’re only a good gay if you are Labour, and that applies to heterosexuals too.

With government doing absolutely nothing on the Gaffarena scandal, it fell upon the Nationalist Party to do what the Prime Minister should have done immediately. The PN wrote to the Auditor General and asked him to investigate the case.

The letter makes chilling reading, for it contains allegations of leakage of government confidential information, if not corruption.

With its back against the wall, the Labour government had to resign itself to an investigation because there was no option, now that the Auditor General has been called in. That the government did not take the initiative is a scandal in itself, but the standards and public expectations of Labour are so low that their reluctance to act did not ruffle a feather.

Labour was never fit for purpose because it still cannot be trusted to seek the common good. Having found a robust economy, a Labour government has so far turned out to be a two-year orgy of greed.

The situation has even alarmed the Chamber of Commerce that last week lamented of “cases of flagrant abuse, bad management, dubious decision processes, conflicts of interest and outright lack of coordination between different elements of the public sector with citizens expected to pay endlessly for the damage”.

That wasn’t very nicely put, but accurate.

This will go on as long as the economy continues to do well because Labour speaks the language that many people know best, through their pockets.

It will take a very mature and conscientious electorate to rise above the endless hype being dished out by Labour and put a stop to this rot. Let us see if they will step up to the plate, when the next opportunity arises.