A recipe for scandal

It would be stating the obvious to point out that Malta’s political establishment is currently rocked by scandal on all fronts. 

In recent months and years we have witnessed a rapid succession of allegations of high-level corruption (and/or misconduct, or serious misjudgements), affecting officials of both Nationalist and Labour parties, which have collectively eroded public trust in politics to dangerously low levels.

Ever since the oil procurement scandal broke into the public domain, revelations of ministerial misdemeanours have followed thick and fast, one after the other. There seems to be no end of them. Interior Minister Manuel Mallia was removed from office after an inquiry found he had misled the public regarding a shooting incident involving his personal driver. Two former Nationalist ministers, Michael Falzon and Ninu Zammit, were named as account-holders in the ongoing Swiss leaks affair, and have been suspended from the PN. 

More recently, the reacquisition by the government of the Café Premier lease in Valletta has come under fire by the National Audit Office as a case of wilful (and needless) squandering of public funds to the benefit of the former lease-holders… prompting accusations of deliberate misuse of taxpayers’ money for political ends.

Everywhere one looks, there are indications that something is deeply, deeply amiss with the state of Maltese politics… and, more worryingly still, with the state of the public service, which in many cases appears to be roped into what is fast resembling a culture of corruption at all levels.

The latest in this series of revelations concerns the Gozo ministry. A whistleblower has now stepped forward, claiming that the ministry had offered free construction services, and materials, (at the taxpayer’s expense) to Gozitan constituents ahead of the last election. The scheme was allegedly coordinated by former Gozo Minister Giovanna Debono’s husband Anthony – who was the officer-in-charge of the Gozo Ministry’s Construction and Maintenance Unit (CMU) until the last election – and allegedly targeted people who were potential voters of the former minister. 

What was on offer included construction work of all sorts commissioned months before the last election, some of which was executed even on the election day itself.  These allegations are currently being investigated by the police.

Giovanna Debono has since denied any wrongdoing, and Opposition leader Simon Busuttil has chosen to await the police investigation before taking any decision about her. Either way, the case is revealing because it inadvertently places its finger on the heart of the malaise: i.e., an alarming lack of awareness of the standards expected of public officials in any healthy democracy.

As long ago as 2004, Minister Debono had been questioned regarding her husband’s position within the public service: a position that would be considered utterly unacceptable in any democratic country where political propriety is given its due weight.

As officer-in-charge for the CMU, Anthony Debono was responsible for general public works around the island of Gozo, as well as roadworks, general maintenance of government property and housing, infrastructural maintenance, and other services for different government offices. 

One would have to be blind not to see a glaring anomaly in the fact that such a sensitive position, which has access to the budgetary allocation of the Gozo ministry, should be occupied by the incumbent minister’s own spouse. Yet Giovanna Debono herself saw no problem with the arrangement… and more significantly, neither did anyone else within the government of the time. If anyone did see any problem with that situation, no one raised it – as far as is known.

This alone speaks volumes about the state of health of Malta’s public structures in the 21st century. Throughout the above-mentioned scandals, there has been a consistent pattern of behaviour exhibited by the two political parties concerned: both react strongly to such scandals when these emerge in public – which, if it happens at all, will invariably be thanks to the media, and never as a result of any official, unprompted probe – but only after the fat is already in the fire. 

One can easily discern, therefore, that in the absence of an inquisitive media to expose such cases, all such conflicts of interest would be routinely ignored. This in turn points towards an unspoken code, tacitly agreed to between the two parties, that corruption in general is to be tolerated… so long as the perpetrator does not get caught. 

Once caught, the political parties affected by the ensuing scandal will suddenly don a mantle of feigned shock and concern… when all along it has always been in the power of successive governments, occupied by both parties, to ensure that the proper checks and balances to ward off such possibilities are in place.

Even today, with corruption scandals oozing out of every open wound in the political establishment, there has still been no serious attempt to address the core issue at the heart of the matter. 

Ultimately, if Malta still lacks a functional system of checks and balances to minimise the scope for corruption – as all the above cases clearly indicate – it is because the country as a whole still lacks a culture of political propriety. It is a basic principle of modern democracy that public office-holders should be held to a higher standard of public behaviour than other citizens… yet in Malta, we have resigned ourselves to the clean opposite scenario instead. 

Ordinary citizens are forever held to higher standards of scrutiny and accountability, while expectations of governments and national institutions constantly plummet. The result is a school for scandal. Ultimately the worst sufferer is democracy.