EU Presidency, what EU Presidency?

It all started out with such high hopes, such promise. Malta, the government said, would be placed at the heart of the European Union, it would push its national agenda, it would reunite a fragmenting bloc in the wake of Brexit and it would put miniscule Malta on the EU map more than ever before.

But Malta’s stint at the helm of the European Union was from the outset destined for trouble, given the long and enduring shadow that the Panama Papers has cast over it, and if the government had not been able to read the writing on the wall, it should have considered paying heed to the numerous warnings that were as plain as day.

But matters have grown exponentially since those simpler days when the scandal involved only the energy minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff who were found to have opened companies in Panama.

That situation has now expanded to accusations that the wife of the Prime Minister himself had done likewise, and that the chief of staff was taking kickbacks from Malta’s Individual Investor Programme, to the concept of which the vast majority of Members of the European Parliament had objected to so vehemently.

These latest accusations have, whether one subscribes to the school of thought of the government or the Opposition, catalysed the calling of an early election and the current frenetic one-month election campaign.

But in so doing, the government is failing to live up to the duty and promises that the country’s EU Presidency entail.

Firstly, being in the midst of a frantic election campaign in which the government is fighting tooth and nail for survival, it is

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more than obvious that it and its individual cabinet members simply cannot dedicate themselves to the work of the Presidency as they should be doing. The Presidency appears to have fallen by the wayside, to have been placed on the back burner by a government buffeted by scandals and forced into a snap election.

And secondly, the older scandals added to the new allegations the government is facing are casting a very dark cloud over the government and, by default, over the EU itself. Whether or not these new allegations hold water at the end of the day does not change the facts that Malta’s name and its EU Presidency have been significantly tainted.

And matters are slated to get worse this month, with the Green Group in the European Parliament having requested an urgent plenary session debate next week over the fresh allegations. A decision on whether to have that debate, provisionally titled ‘Panama Papers follow up: suspicion of money laundering in Malta involving several politically exposed persons’ will be taken today.

Secondly, the European Parliament’s PANA Committee has called in the Prime Minister himself to appear before it because, in the words of its chairman in a letter to the Prime Minister: “Given the recent developments on the matter as regards the possible involvement of your wife in suspected transactions related to the Panama Papers, the members of the Committee have decided to extend the invitation to you.” The Committee had already invited the Prime Minister’s chief of staff to appear this month, and it had even called on the Prime Minister to “use his authority” to force him to appear to do so time around, but the request has apparently been ignored by the Maltese government.

But in the meantime, rest assured that the Prime Minister has no such inclination to meet the committee’s request in either respect. He has only said that he will appear before the PANA Committee when the magisterial inquiry into the matter is wrapped up. And in the meantime, what we have is a caretaker Maltese government, now that Parliament has been dissolved in anticipation of the coming election, and what Europe has is essentially a caretaker EU Presidency. Is this what the EU needs at this delicate juncture? We think not. Come 4 June, should the Opposition win at the polls, the EU will be faced with a situation in which a new Maltese government and Prime Minister will take over the EU Presidency. Whether such a situation is with precedent or not, it will be a strange and far from ideal situation.

That new stewardship would theoretically not only take over a national government, but also the EU Presidency, with all that it entails, for less than a month as Malta’s term expires on 1 July. That new government would also become responsible for implementing its predecessor’s agenda.

Should the government – out of its responsibility to the EU – not have waited to call the election on at least 1 July, which is coincidentally the first Saturday after handing over Presidency to Estonia, so as not to foist its problems on the EU as a whole?

Having started out with such high hopes and aspirations, Malta’s EU Presidency is quickly turning into an unmitigated disaster.