Galdes, misplaced loyalties and accountability

Over the weekend Roderick Galdes did what he should have done more than a month earlier and resigned from Cabinet. He did so on Saturday evening in anticipation of a story that was going to be published in The Sunday Times of Malta.

The resignation letter was not an apology. On the contrary it was a message of defiance, a cri de guerre. Pleading innocence, Galdes insisted he did nothing wrong and will be fighting the allegations in his regard but was resigning so as not to shackle government’s and the Labour Party’s work. The tone was anything but suggestive of a man who was stepping down because he understood that he had become a liability for the public office he held. On the contrary, what Galdes was worried about was the impact the mounting pressure would have on the Labour Party.

There was a telling sentence in Galdes’s letter that suggests where the man’s loyalties are: “Like I have always done throughout my political career I have always put the party’s interest before anything else.”

For Galdes, the party’s interest trumps everything else; presumably, including the national interest he should have been serving as a minister of state. And that is precisely where the problem is. Ministers are there, first and foremost, to serve the public by discharging their state duties towards all citizens in an honest, diligent and fair way. By his own admission, Galdes chose to “put the party’s interest before anything else”. We just wonder how that translated in the work he performed in the housing sector.

On 7 December this leader had called on Galdes to resign in the wake of revelations that showed how he acquired a duplex penthouse with airspace and garage in Gozo for €141,000—a price that was below market value. To compound matters, Galdes had acquired the penthouse from a developer, who benefitted from a Housing Authority scheme by which it leased out apartments from private companies for use as social housing.

Back then, we had argued that the penthouse saga was not just a question of conflict of interest but also one of bad judgement that made Galdes unfit for purpose. “This is why he should step down from minister and if not, the responsibility falls on the prime minister to remove him,” we had written.

The prime minister did not act. Instead, he defended Galdes even as serious doubts were being cast over the minister’s vast property portfolio in Malta, Italy and the UK. Abela did the right thing to accept Galdes’s resignation on Saturday but he has to explain why the sudden change of heart. It’s not enough to tag along with the explanation Galdes gave that he was resigning to clear his name without saddling government with his problems.

Abela would do well to stop defending Galdes and keep at arm’s length from his former minister.

In the latest saga, a company that won a tender to build social housing units ended up subcontracting works to a company belonging to an Italian national, who had ties with Galdes’s brother. At face value there is nothing criminal in this but it wreaks of indecency. How was it that from the many construction companies around, the one that was chosen for the subcontracted works on social housing units had to be one associated with the minister’s brother? The proximity is toxic and yet Galdes cannot even begin to understand why eyebrows were raised. For that matter, we doubt whether anyone in Castille understands the toxicity of such an arrangement.

But then there is the wider context that cannot be ignored. Former Labour MEP Marlene Mizzi had accused Galdes of “hobnobbing” with contractors. Mizzi had been speaking about her time as chairperson of Malita Investments plc before stepping down in 2024 because she could not take Galdes’s attempts to interfere with the publicly-listed company’s work, any longer.

It is crucial to note that the accusation of hobnobbing did not emanate from hostile news portals, the independent press, antagonistic civil society groups or the Opposition. No; it came from none other than Mizzi herself; a Labour sympathiser and former MEP, who is today the non-resident ambassador to Sweden and Norway.

Mizzi’s accusation should not have been brushed off lightly, or dismissed by the prime minister and others in leadership positions within the Labour Party. And yet, that is what happened, only for the bomb to explode several weeks later with all the collateral damage that comes with it. It would seem the days of pro-active decision-making based on an expectation of political accountability have long vanished, which is a pity because this country deserves much better.