As Prime Minister Joseph Muscat obstinately refuses to take political responsibility and suspend, as he is widely expected to, his Tourism Minister and chief of staff until they clear their name in the claims over their Panama companies, now dissolved, and the latest revelations over 17 Black, Malta is presented with a shocking account of what it is losing, in money terms, through corruption.
In persisting in such a huge and glaring error – despite the discovery of a smoking gun that ought to have rocked the government to its foundations – Dr Muscat displays an unparalleled air of political arrogance. Worse, he has now lowered to its lowest level ever the bar on standards in political conduct. As regards his protégés, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, their arrogant stance is most shameful and degrading.
With their continued bold disregard to ethical standards, it is no wonder that misdeeds are rising. By consistently refusing to take political responsibility, they are cultivating an environment in which wrongdoing is believed to be an acceptable norm. The GDP may be soaring to dizzying heights but Malta’s moral standards are sinking to the lowest depths.
An inkling of the damage – in money terms – that this is doing to the country is given in a report just published, not by a local organisation or by the Auditor General but by the European Greens. It has quantified corruption costs at a staggering €725 million annually, or 8.65 per cent of GDP.
Across the whole of the European Union, corruption costs come to €904 billion. There will, no doubt, be many who, in dissecting the study, may be tempted to suspect that the figure is a bit wide of the mark. Yet, even if, on further analysis, they are proven to be correct, the study itself, irrespective of whether the amounts mentioned are good or not, represents a harrowing story of sheer waste of money that could have been well utilised had it not been lost to corruption.
The cost is better understood if compared to budgetary allocations. According to the study, the amount is 45 times the entire housing budget, over seven times the national budget for family and children and nearly seven times the entre sickness and disability budget. Astonishingly, it is more than 10 times the size of the annual police budget.
As if these figures were not enough to make an ordinary, well-meaning and correct person seethe with anger, the study also gives a clue of the untold damage Malta’s attitude to corruption is doing to the country’s image. Describing corruption as Europe’s dirty secret, Greens co-president Philippe Lamberts had this to say: “From Victor Orban’s autocratic Hungary to organised crime and Maltese money laundering, a web of corruption spans across our continent.”
The cost of corruption in money terms is bad enough. What is equally, if not more, troubling is the impact the bad name Malta has been getting is bound to have on the country’s future prospects. Despite the legal infrastructure in place to check corruption, the country does not seem to be making headway in this regard. More than half the number of respondents in a Eurostat study believe corruption has worsened.
Unless Dr Muscat urgently does what is expected of him, Malta’s name will be dragged through the gutter.
This is a Times of Malta print editorial