|
It is disturbing to see how incredibly blasé and immune we have become to whiffs of corruption and impropriety by persons in authority. Suspicious behaviour which would give rise to thorough investigation by the foreign press hardly causes a ripple here. More column inches are dedicated to the different pavilions at the trade fair than to investigative reporting and analysis of very questionable behaviour.
Take the case of a court report which appeared in The Times last week. It was tagged with the classic understatement “Former police officer recounts tiffs with police chief”. Now I don’t know about you, but the word “tiffs” brings to my mind squabbles of a petty nature and minor quarrels in the office about who wants the air conditioner switched on and who would prefer to have it off, and who filched the remaining chocolate biscuit from the tin, and who used up the last toilet paper square. The matter described in the report was anything but a humdrum matter of the sort.
Ivan Portelli, a former police inspector, had been dismissed from the force. He filed a lawsuit against the Prime Minister and the Police Commissioner claiming that his dismissal was unjust. In the course of his testimony, he explained that when he was in the Fraud Squad he had issued criminal charges against Michael Caruana, the prominent lawyer/businessman who was subsequently involved in the Fort Chambray project. The then Police Commissioner George Grech had told him to drop the charges, but Portelli had not complied with this request. Some time later he was transferred to Hamrun and the Caruana case reassigned to Inspector Helga Debono. The report ended with an extremely cryptic remark as Portelli observed that there was no need to say why the charges against the lawyer had been dropped.
I’m intrigued. Why is there no need to explain why the charges had been withdrawn? Is this some inside information that only the police are privy to? Was there, or is there, a direct line to the Police Commissioner which you can use to ask him to please drop charges against you? There might be a perfectly innocent explanation for the former Commissioner’s actions (such as the charges being time-barred) but from where we’re sitting it looks very much like a superior officer leaning on an underling and insisting that legally issued charges be withdrawn, having him spirited away when he refused to comply. Why the charges were eventually withdrawn, and by whom, are questions which deserve an answer. No, these matters are not just “tiffs”.
It was only a matter of time until the usual wet blankets descended with depressing force upon the rent referendum campaign being promoted by Alternattiva Demokratika. Despite the fact that these critics all agree that the archaic rent laws are grossly unjust and should be repealed, they simply fail to see the point of a referendum which would do just that. They warned us that the holding of a referendum was dangerous and that an unsuccessful outcome would make landowners’ plight even worse. They claimed that if successful, a referendum would cause overnight change with tremendous social and economic damage. And anybody with half a brain cell groaned at the predictability of it all. Because it is more than evident that these spoilsports will only approve of those changes or proposals made by the political party which they support, and will not tolerate any initiatives proposed by another political party or grouping.
We had Dr Malcolm Mifsud, the Nationalist version of the Mannekin Piss, the famous Belgian statue of a little boy weeing into a fountain. Dr Mifsud attempted to rain on the rent reform parade, by stating that a referendum would result in people being thrown out on the street. By making such an outlandish claim, Dr Mifsud betrays his utter lack of faith in his party, currently in government. Together with the Opposition, the government forms the legislature. The Nationalist party’s majority in Parliament means that every law approved by it will make it to the statute books.
In the event of the special rent laws being repealed, the government could very well pass a law regulating the transition from a controlled regime to a fully liberalised market. The law could serve to cushion the effects of the removal of protection in the short term. It could, for example, provide that senior citizens and other deserving cases are entitled to remain in their residences until their death. It could allow the rent which is paid by commercial enterprises to be increased gradually, thus enabling them to retain the place of business where they are well established and well known. In short, such a law could ensure that the whole country is eased back to a liberalised regime, one which is regulated by the Civil Code, without their being any sudden jolts and legions of Dr Mifsud’s homeless tenants roaming the streets.
It is rumoured that the government has a very sensible plan to ease out the rent laws, up its sleeve. Limited liability companies will be the first to lose the protection afforded to them by the old rent laws. These will be followed by sole traders, and finally the right of inheritance of leases will be removed. It is good to hear that such a plan has been formulated. The big question is what is the government waiting for to implement it? Haven’t the thousands of landlords deprived of their property for ages been vociferous enough?
Even if such a plan is still being fine-tuned, the government would do well to publicise the fact that it exists. At least to put property-owners out of their misery.
If the plan or law doesn’t surface soon we’re going to think one of two things. The first is that the Nationalist government is biding its time in order to gazump the referendum campaign, present its legislation with much fanfare and claim all the credit. This would be a case of “jidhlu ghac-capcipa”, but who cares? At least reform would have been effected. However, if the government persists in keeping shtoom about its legislative plans, we might well be forgiven for thinking that such plans don’t exist, or that they’re buried beneath a pile of Francis Zammit Dimech’s plane tickets to Cannes. Or perhaps they’re nestling somewhere underneath Tonio Borg’s filofax – the one where he lists the addresses of all the single-member societies which support his constitutional gimmicks. We watch and wait.
The negative brigade insist that the holding of a referendum is a dangerous option. Should the “yes” vote not secure a successful outcome, they claim that landlords will be in a worse position than they are now, because rent reform will never make it to the top of the national agenda. Why not lobby quietly and get the government to act in accordance with the strategy it already has in hand, they ask? I suspect that landlords have overdosed on tea and biscuits outside Nationalist ministers’ waiting rooms, in their repeated attempts to get the reform ball rolling. The truth of the matter is that there have only been two successful non-political lobby groups in Maltese history and these were the hunters and the Gift of Life movement. All the others, no matter how deserving their cause, have been ignored.
Those wanting to rent law reform, have absolutely nothing to lose by supporting a referendum campaign. It is a powerful means of bringing pressure to bear on the government, so they should go ahead and use it. At worst, the present situation will continue to subsist. If the government really has a legislative cure-all waiting in the wings, it would be extremely churlish of it to refuse to implement it simply because the requisite referendum quota has not been reached. The downers would have landlords ingratiating themselves and lobbying such a government. What a dismal prospect.
cl.bon@global.net.mt
|
