Imagine all the people

The last weeks in Malta were brilliant material for a Netflix series. Labour manages to satisfy all criteria. We had ample doses of drama, forbidden romance, crime and twists of plot.

The final episode started with the court delivering its long-awaited judgment on the Vitals concession. We had the concessionaire, Steward, throwing a tantrum and then we had a Prime Minister who, very oddly, put up a more spirited defence of Steward in Parliament than Steward itself.

We also had a former prime minister muttering ominous reminders to old colleagues that they had better be careful in which direction they point fingers.

What happened last week was long in coming. It started with the revelations of Daphne Caruana Galizia on the machinations to hand over our hospitals to a shell company called Vitals with zero experience in healthcare. The intriguing saga moved along thanks to the continuous pressure of the PN, and it got there thanks to Adrian Delia who personally fronted the case in court.

It is now clear to all. We are being robbed to the tune of €400 million. The first reaction from people of goodwill for such blatant theft of Maltese assets is anger. Justified as it may be, anger as a reaction does not get us far. We’re up against well-laid plans here. We need to be as astute as the planners to undo their plans. Overcoming the deviant Labour plot on Vitals was done through painstaking legal work, analysing clauses and provisos and arguing them in court. It is ironic as much as it is true that a hundred press conferences and political declarations did not get us any closer to justice. This is a lesson to all of us who want to see the change our country deserves.

As a PN candidate for the MEP election, I keep a close eye on the European dimension of good governance in Malta. There is an intrinsic link between freedom of movement and good government spending. The EU is, after all, an area of free movement; a single market. Fairness and transparency are essential for this single market to deliver the benefits which it is supposed to deliver.

Nevertheless, applying fairness and transparency is not something ad hoc or arbitrary; it is based on rules. In the Vitals case, as for any other government contract, the applicable rules are set out in the EU’s Directive on public procurement that Member States are obliged to transpose into their national legislation.

EU law and national law tells us that no contract with public money should be concluded without an open call for all participants to offer their best bid. That law tells us that a private entity entering into contract with government should bear its risks and that contracts entered into must not be modified afterwards to shift the risks and burdens back on government. All of these principles were broken in the most spectacular way in the Vitals deal.

The auditor general had already told us twice in reports going three years back that those provisions of the law were breached with ill-intent - yet nothing happened.

The system is failing us at both the national and European level. In fact, more than a year ago I submitted two separate formal complaints with the European Commission on the Vitals deal. I asked the European Commission as “the guardian of the EU Treaties” to look into the deal. The reply I received was that the Commission services did not have enough information to proceed with the case. I understand that such services receive complaints from the 27 nations of the EU. The workload must be huge, but the outcome of those complaints show that the EU fails to defend the Maltese taxpayers against their government.

This must change. The EU’s emphasis on rule of law cannot be a vague principled battle cry. I want to see the rule of law in government’s abuse of our tax money first and foremost. For this to happen we must invest in new methods to force the change on Labour’s operations. Use of EU tools remains a priority.

We must have the temerity of pursuing our dues at national level too. In the government structures we should have an office meant to promote the proper application of procurement rules.

The Contracts Department headed by its Director who is also the Chairman of the Contracts Committee is tasked by law to ensure fair value and due process in the spending of public money. The law puts that obligation on the Director. It does not include any provisos for interference by the likes of Konrad Mizzi or Robert Abela.

After the Auditor General’s reports saying that the Vitals deal was in breach of the law, the Contracts Department was in duty bound to act to stop the contract in the first place . The law gives wide-ranging powers to the Director of contracts, but in this case as in many others he chose to keep those powers dormant.

It is no use having institutions with powers which are then not exercised in order to protect our prerogatives as citizens and taxpayers. For this reason, this week I wrote an open letter to the Director of Contracts asking him to recognise his faults and to consider his position in that important public role. I think this should also serve as a lesson to many others in public roles, be they by election or by appointment.

People are getting angrier by the day at Labour’s attitude of pigs at the trough as nicely illustrated in Rosianne Cutajar’s chats. We will seek our pound of flesh and we want our money back. As an MEP candidate this will be one of my priority areas, to pursue this battle both at national and European level.