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Matthew Vella
Former premier Dom Mintoff is keeping up his fight against the Water Services Corporation, which in November 2004 suspended his water and electricity for one day. The reason: Mintoff was obstinate in not paying a Lm1,230 bill spanning over seven years. The service was reinstated the next day, after longstanding confidant and legal counsel Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, paid the bill against Mintoff’s will.
The 88-year-old is now claiming he will either have to leave the island, or “die quietly at home” because he cannot find any assistance (“servitù”) that will work at his home under the dire conditions that government works and broken drains have left at his house, The Olives.
Mintoff is appealing a sentence issued by Mr Justice Geoffrey Valenzia, who threw out his constitutional case against the WSC because he had recourse to an ordinary remedy. Although the one-day suspension was enough for Mintoff to take his case to the highest courts, claiming discrimination and serious danger to his health, Valenzia rightly pointed out the Constitutional Court was not there to be inundated by “unnecessary” cases.
Undeterred, Mintoff and his lawyers, among them Prof Ian Refalo, the dean of the faculty of laws at the University of Malta, have appealed the sentence.
Mintoff now claims he can find no assistance to work at his house, besieged by problems from government works in his road which have damaged his water and electricity connections. Neither local council nor the Water Services Corporation apparently have been able to assist him, he said.
Mintoff actually got Bank of Valletta – the bank he created when he nationalised the private National Bank of Malta – to advance him Lm3,000 for works intended to keep water from seeping indoors and instead fill up into his reservoir, and mend his drains. He said he needed the water for his trees, many of which he said were 150 years old and of national heritage.
Now just two alternatives are open to the man formerly dubbed the saviour of Malta: “either go abroad or die quietly at home… and with these alternatives his rights as a normal Maltese citizen have been reduced to nothing.”
Additionally, his appeal concluded “Perit Duminku Mintoff has no criminal accusations against him.”
Mintoff’s case before the Constitutional Court was thrown out earlier this month after Judge Valenzia ruled that the suspension of the service for one day could not have seriously endangered Mintoff’s health, as alleged by the former PM himself. “Perit Mintoff himself brought about this situation, by never paying the pending bills for the water and electricity he availed himself of.”
Valenzia also ruled there was no breach of Mintoff’s right to a fair trial, the respect for his private and family life, his protection from discrimination, or his peaceful enjoyment of his property. “Water and electricity are not the applicants’ property… In order to enjoy these utilities they also had the obligation to pay for them, or else contest the amount owed. In the meantime, the property in question was still the applicants’ and they could therefore still enjoy it.”
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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