Give Malta a break
We are in the second month of the EU presidency but nobody in our country is talking about it. The social media is packed with cold shower jokes and comments on Chris Cardona.
Claudette Buttigieg is a PN MP – cbuttigieg08@gmail.com, twitter: @ButClaudette
Elvis Presley’s 1963 hit Fun in Acapulco is hitting the local social media charts. All the innuendos imaginable are surfacing in basic day-to-day situations. In other words, the whole Tagħna Lkoll world is a joke. And in very bad taste too. How sad and humiliating it must be for our prime minister and his cabinet of ministers who have to face their European counterparts while all this mess is going on.
Poor Chris Fearne, the health minister, had to discuss HIV and sexually transmitted diseases bang on the day this story made the headlines. And once again, the important efforts of what should be a good educational campaign became a joke.
Chris Cardona is claiming innocence but ran away from journalists at the airport and took some secret exit route. How strange. He missed his first opportunity to substantiate his innocence by running away. I thought his PR consultants would jump at such an opportunity and stage a robust, accusation-busting press conference to depict a man unjustly accused and persecuted by the media.
Perhaps the choice not to do the press conference was because the majority of people believe that the minister actually did what Daphne Caruana Galizia reported in her blog updates. The point of concern for the minister should be that people believe he is capable of doing what Ms Caruana Galizia is claiming. They believe that the whole story fits the minister’s reputation.
Had Ms Caruana Galizia reported that a different minister or MP was part of the sleazy story would the public have believed her? With all due respect, would anybody have believed the whole story had the minister involved been Edward Scicluna for instance? Definitely not.
Of course, Ms Caruana Galizia has her reputation also. And while I disagree with her personal judgement of our deputy leader, Mario De Marco, her main credibility lies in the fact that she single-handedly revealed the Panama Papers scandal in Malta and the direct connection with Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.
With Malta’s reputation at stake, you would think all the government side would make an extra effort and simply … behave. Is that too much to ask of a small group of men and women who promised accountability, transparency and meritocracy? Who promised, actually, to be the best Cabinet, the most feminist government in history?
In other “normal” western countries Ministers would step aside to prove their innocence while others would simply resign.
During the last few hours, the government has made a huge attempt to distract the main attention from the Chris Cardona case. Ironically, the new story, which surfaced in parliament on Wednesday, following a Ministerial statement by Owen Bonnici, is that of yet another corruption scandal. The Permanent Commission Against Corruption is “morally convinced” that the ex-PL Secretary General, Jimmy Magro, “requested money during tenders adjudication.”
For crying out loud, can’t these people give Malta a break?
Chris Cardona did turn up to vote in parliament on Wednesday. He walked in five minutes before voting time and vanished the minute the vote was confirmed. He had the look of a school boy caught redhanded stealing from the school tuck shop after his return from suspension. Some of his colleagues gave him a nudgenudge look, while other men passed some funny manly (probably sexist) comment. Some looked at him with disdain, perhaps not much for what he did, but more for getting caught.
From my seat it looked like many of the MPs on the government side do not believe Chris Cardona either.