Habitual exposure to anything, however unpleasant it may be, renders one to become accustomed to it, as is the case with casualty personnel and the sight of blood. Our society is now facing the same situation.
We are fast becoming immune to daily revelations of corruption, government handouts to party loyalists, including handing over public land worth millions for peanuts, multiple jobs to the same individuals and an in-your-face ‘we shall because we can’ attitude, which has no respect for any norms and laws.
It is an established practice worldwide that ministers and politically exposed persons (PEPs) accept that they must live according to strict codes of conduct, and submit themselves to intrusive and uncomfortable levels of scrutiny.
And yet, five years of constant, escalating scandals, of standards slipping so far and so fast that you can’t even see them anymore, have seemingly numbed our sensibilities, so that what was once unacceptable, is now fatalistically shrugged away by far too many.
Since Labour took over power, their actions were never casual. They were always causal. The civil service was decapitated the morning after the election, with many permanent secretaries being made to resign simply because they were not trusted to blindly toe the partisan line.
Party loyalists were appointed even to the judiciary. This laid the ground for all that was to follow. This erosion of the institutions was premeditated insurance cover for the concurrent setting-up of untraceable Panamanian companies within days of getting power by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri (plus Egrant’s owner).
This should already have been enough for them to resign, or to be fired. They exposed themselves and Malta’s government to enormous criticism everywhere. They should have gone, or been made to leave. Yet they stayed.
Things may still look grim right now, but if all of us who aspire to something better, stand up to this arrogance, a better day will dawn
As they doggedly tried to find anyone dodgy enough to let them open a ‘no questions asked’ bank account for their secret companies, despite their status as PEPs, they indicated two companies called 17 Black and Macbridge as “target clients”. In plain language, this meant that these companies were expected to pay money into the secret companies they had set up days after gaining power, to the tune of €1 million a year each.
A new, added layer has recently come to light. We now know the identity of the owner of 17 Black – a person with shareholding in Electrogas, the winner of the contract for the construction of the new power station.
According to leaked business plan extracts drawn up by Nexia BT, Electrogas will receive, from the Maltese government, billions in revenues over a 19-year period. And who were the drivers of this deal?
None other than Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, while Nexia BT’s Brian Tonna (who set up the Panama accounts for Schembri and Mizzi) was on Enemalta’s selection committee for the new power station. Coincidence? I think not.
In pre-Muscat Malta (imperfect and flawed as it was), just like in any other developed democracy, all those involved would have been out on their ear years ago. Yet we still have to suffer them because Joseph Muscat keeps them on, despite the unbearable stench of corruption that engulfs them, making it only natural that so many have strong doubts about his own behaviour as well.
Our government may be sleazy and corrupt at so many levels, but our country is better than this. As a decent society, notwithstanding our government, we simply cannot allow ourselves to believe that the stench is acceptable, justifying it by some trivial advantage that we perceive as being associated with it.
Corruption erodes and destroys societies and countries, and those who benefit most from it will eventually walk away, leaving us holding the bag for years to follow.
Things may still look grim right now, but if all of us who aspire to something better, stand up to this arrogance, a better day will dawn.
We try to call our government to account precisely because we love our country, and we will continue to do so – whatever self-serving apologists may say.
We will keep on fighting and using all the democratic means at our disposal to ensure that decency once again prevails, that public funds are used for public service, and that justice and fairness hold sway in Malta once again.
Let us not allow ourselves to become inured to the sight of blood, be it metaphorical, or literal. In the quest for truth and justice, we have already seen far too much spilled, on that fateful day just over a year ago.
Roberta Metsola is a Nationalist Party MEP.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece