Where has the safe pair of hands gone?

While Muscat gets top marks for his sense of humour, I wonder whether such a comment merits being taken seriously, more so as it was uttered on 1 April!

Who will be inaugurating the project is a banal issue, considering what has been going on with its financing. The problem is that the City Gate project had to be financed by a financial vehicle that is not yet in place and now relies on a Bank of Valletta loan that does not even appear on the government's official books or budget. The loan has been granted to the Grand Harbour Regeneration Corporation, although I have no doubt that the bank has got the government guaranteeing the loan, as is normal procedure when banks lend money to State entities.

According to the government, the corporation was to set up a new company that would get the funds for the project through the issuing of shares sold to the public. The government would also enter into a lease agreement and rent the new Parliament and the new roofless theatre for a guaranteed number of years from the company. Instead of loaning money by issuing more bonds, the government will raise money by selling shares in this corporation. It looks like a smooth ingenious scheme for hiding what is essentially an increase in government debt.

Yet something must have gone amiss. While the project is progressing as per schedule and will be completed by the time the Administration had originally planned to go to the polls, the new company is nowhere to be seen and no shares have been offered to the public. One wonders why. Perhaps the setting up of this scheme - described as an innovative type of financial vehicle - was not as easy a job as the administration had implied when it first thought it out.

Konrad Mizzi, a management consultant writing about the issue in The Times last Wednesday asked whether BoV will be a shareholder of the new company, i.e. whether it will convert its loan - or part of it - into shares of the proposed new company. As these shares will be listed on the Malta Stock Exchange, BoV would not be committed to hold on to them and it will be able to sell them, if the price is good. I do not recall having seen this concept before but it is certainly a good question to ask, more so as the government has a 'golden share' in BoV with the right to appoint its chairperson.

What seems to have been thought out as a simple financial operation is apparently now being bogged down by the details and this is, perhaps, why the company has not yet been set up, let alone its shares being offered to the public. All this comes at a time when government has bowed to pressures from Brussels and reduced the projected expenditure that it had indicated in this year's budget approved last November. It seems that Brussels was not exactly as optimistic as the government with regard to projected revenue: hence the cuts that Labour has been criticising as if they were being done capriciously, rather than as a fact that shows that government finances are in the sort of mess that one would not have expected from Gonzi's much vaunted safe pair of hands.

Add to this problem, the government's post-budget financial commitments to help Air Malta and Enemalta get out of their own mess... and the mess gets even messier.

What I cannot understand is that instead of criticising government for having led the country into this situation, Joseph Muscat keeps on selling the idea that if he were in government, all will be well to the extent that even electricity tariffs will be reduced and everyone will get a minimum living wage.

I would have expected Muscat to tell people that after being elected, we would have to face some austerity measures, at least in the beginning of his term as Prime Minister; mimicking Dom Mintoff's famous call for a belt-tightening ('issikar taċ-ċintorin') exercise as the key to future prosperity.

But in Malta, we would have none of that. We have the Prime Minister and his administration insisting that Malta's economy is in good shape, comparing our good employment rate with the calamitous rate in countries such as Spain, while the Labour Party promises that life will be even rosier with them tending the garden.

When will we grow up?

***

I do not recall a time when the Police Force was in such a big mess. The new twist in the story of the mysterious death of Nicholas Azzopardi at the Police Headquarters way back in 2007 has made matters worse.

This week the country has heard the news of a magistrate declaring an arrest to be illegal. Later this decision was overturned on appeal by a judge who rued that the correct procedure was used during the arrest. What is worrying is not whether the constable in question followed the wrong procedure, but that the arrested man was the former business partner of the boyfriend of the constable's daughter. The constable was not even on duty when he allegedly beat and arrested the man. Delving into the case made by the police in prosecuting a well-known heart surgeon and another doctor will reveal interesting facts that might explain the unorthodox manner in which the case progressed.

We have had the story of the policeman shooting an immigrant with the Commissioner called an extraordinary press conference to explain that it was all in 'self defence' as this particular immigrant was wielding a big knife and was pepper-spray proof! This is not the first time that some police officers have showed themselves to be trigger happy, of course.

There is not just the odd rotten apple. To be fair, action is actually taken against the rotten apples and currently we have probably a record number of members of the Police Corps who have been arraigned in court accused of various crimes. But this statistic is worrying in itself and it should ring some bells.

That's another safe pair of hands that is no longer safe!

The author is a popular commentator and a former PN Cabinet minister