Can’t pay your bills? Don’t worry, that’s what foreigners are for…

I told myself I’d give the PN a break for the summer, primarily because these days it’s no longer just little me to voice disappointment (and a certain amount of exasperation, frustration, disbelief, etc.) at the truly pitiful state this once formidable political party has allowed itself to degenerate into in the last 10 years.

Suddenly, everyone and their dog now seems to want to have a go at the PN… including quite a few of the people who berated me for criticising the same party just before the last election. Amazing, how people’s attitudes seem to change the moment ‘their’ party no longer wields the power to reward any of its staunch defenders with nice, cushy little perks here and there. But such, I suppose, is the fickle nature of politics.

In any case: the PN’s allies have now grown rather thin on the ground, and I for one am not surprised. The reality is that it is becoming simply too much of an effort to carry on defending the indefensible. But while I said I’d take a back seat for a change, I now find it impossible to shut my mouth in the wake of two recent developments which have hammered the point home with unprecedented force and precision.

The first (which received surprisingly little media attention at the time) was a June 1 court ruling that ordered the PN to settle a €500,000 debt with a single company: Europrint Ltd. I am told that this represents but the tip of an enormous iceberg - the PN’s debt in total runs into at least €8 million – but the case is interesting because it also gives us an indication of how this debt was incurred in the first place.

As someone who has worked in the print business for a couple of decades, I have an idea of how easy it is to run up massive bills with printing companies. Billboards, brochures, leaflets, adverts for newspapers and whatnot… these are all expensive things, and it is to meet these expenses that political parties organise annual fund-raising activities, raising anywhere up to a million euros a pop.

But to rack up a bill of half a million euros with a single company, after collecting millions of euros in contributions (specifically for the purpose of paying such debts, by the way: it’s called ‘campaigning’) from a bona fide electorate… and then to default on that debt, even when the company is forced to seek legal action, which means you also run the risk of a fatal blow to your credibility in the event of a negative ruling…ooh, I don’t know. Coming from a political party which also feels entitled to lecture us all on public morality, the sheer cheek alone is simply breathtaking.

But there is more than just cheek at work here. We now know the precise details, which makes it possible to trace the same ‘je-m’en-fous’ attitude to its inception. The case was filed in 2013, over debts incurred between 2006 and 2009: i.e. when the PN was gearing up for its first election with Lawrence Gonzi at the helm. The time period also coincides with the last two years of Joe Saliba as PN secretary-general, and the first year of Paul Borg Olivier.

(On a side note: 2009 was also the year the government set up ARMS Ltd, with the declared aim of collecting as much as possible of the eight hundred million owed to Enemalta and the Water Services Corporation in unpaid debts. The relevance of this detail should become clear in a short while.)

By 2013, not a single cent of this €500,000 bill had been paid. This in turn means that Europrint had spent four years trying to recoup its dues before resorting to court action: something no business will ever willingly do unless it really has to.

It is easy to see why it felt it had to on this occasion. Businesses struggle with cash-flow problems at the best of time. Businesses which also have unrecoverable debts running into half a million euros usually end up filing for bankruptcy.

Yet despite the seriousness of the implications for both sides, at no point during this time – and even in the year it took the court to reach its decision – was any form of settlement reached. In the end, after four years of simply fobbing off an increasingly desperate creditor, the PN allowed itself to suffer the indignity of a court order to cough up half a million in unpaid debts. What does this tell us, exactly, about the party’s attitude towards such issues as debt… or, for that matter, its expectations of the justice system?

Meanwhile, we now also know that while the PN was busy avoiding its own financial commitments to at least one of its many creditors… it was also regularly defaulting payment on its utility bills. Here the final bill came to slightly higher: €1.9 million. This raises multiple questions. Half a million on brochures I can understand, even if it is a little steep. But how do you rack up an electricity and water bill of almost two million euros? Was the PN using halogen lamps to cultivate a secret underground marijuana plantation? Did it leave the washing machine running on full power for half a century? Or did it just ignore every single water and electricity bill it ever received?

Well, we don’t know the answer to that one, because the entity responsible for collecting utility dues (see? I told you it would become relevant) is ARMS Ltd, and it has to date resisted demands made through the Freedom of Information Act to provide information regarding the bills themselves… and even more pertinently, regarding the mysterious repayment programmes it appears to have devised for the benefit of political parties.

There in a nutshell you have the full extent of hypocrisy to marvel at: ARMS Ltd was set up by the Nationalist administration with the specific goal of getting the rest of the population (i.e., you and me) to pay precisely the same sort of debt which the Nationalist Party evidently thought did not apply to itself.

This on its own would be the instant death-knell of a political party anywhere else in the civilised world. How any of the people involved (aye, for therein lies the rub: almost all the people making up today’s shadow cabinet were key players in the administration responsible for all this mess) can now face the electorate with plans to salvage Enemalta’s debt… when they themselves are among the corporation’s unpaying creditors… is truly one of the great mysteries of our time.

And just when you think things couldn’t get any worse… well, what do you know? Out pops a small army of indignant expats to open a class action suit against ARMS for discriminating against foreigners.

You’ve got to hand it to these pesky foreigners, though. They sure have a sense of timing. So just when we get to discover that the PN had for years allowed its energy bills to skyrocket out of all forms of control… we also find out that the same government which tried to get us all to pay our bills on time, also arranged things in such a way that foreigners get to pay 60% more for electricity than Maltese citizens.

Ooh la la. Would it be conspiratorial on my part to link these two facts and see what we come up with? So the party in government in 2009 owes hundreds of thousands in utility bills… but oh look, there’s a nice little minority group that everyone despises anyway (they’re foreign, remember?), so… why not just pass on the expense to them? Let’s see now: around seven percent of the population pays 60% more for, mmm, let’s just say five years… and how much does that work out at?

Sadly my mathematical capabilities are not really up to the task. But I reckon it would eventually cover two million, with a little left over to spend on a rainy day.

Oh, and incidentally the same revelation also sheds rather interesting light on the other party gorging itself from the same trough: Labour, which rode to power in March 2013 on the strength of popular dissatisfaction with ARMS Ltd… yet retained the two-tier billing system, at a time when it owes ARMS an equally impressive €600,000 debt of its own.

Meanwhile, let’s admit that the ‘get-the-foreigners-to-pay-for-it’ is an unlikely conspiracy theory. Even so, the intrinsic problem remains... and the cold truth is that it affects the PN infinitely more than Labour for the time being.

How does the party intend to pay off its 2 million debt to ARMS, its €500,000 debt to Europrint, and the rest of the eight million it is rumoured to owe… and still have enough in the bank to campaign ahead of the next general election? Which printing company (or indeed any company) in its right mind would accept orders from a political party with such a ghastly recent credit history? And how can these problems be solved when the same people responsible for this absurd situation continue to hold down high positions of trust in the same party’s structures?

Well, short of robbing a bank or winning every Super Five lottery until 2021, there’s only one possibility I can think up offhand. Organise another fund raising marathon.

Yes, indeed, I can see the (unpaid) poster already: “Maratona Gbir Ta’ Fondi Inhallsu id-Dejn tal-PN!” So come on folks, what are you all waiting for? It’s collection time! Don’t be selfish. Forget your own financial troubles for a moment, and just dig deep into your own pockets to help out those less fortunate than yourselves…

Honestly, though. That the PN I once knew would have come even within a million miles of this situation is quite frankly unbelievable.