The expendable and the non-expendable
It seems that there are some people who are expendable and others who are not. The director of fisheries, for example, was hung out to dry by the government like so much dirty laundry at the first whiff of corruption allegations. This all right and proper, and exactly the way things should go.
But it seems there are a lot of gooses and a lot of ganders when it comes to government favouritism and protection. Others have done far worse and they are still sitting pretty right where they always have been.
Given the alacrity and speed with which the director of fisheries was suspended, one would think that this government is really on the ball when it come to cracking down on corrupt practices.
We know better, of course. We know full well that there are two weights and two measures when it comes to accountability. The director of fisheries, apparently, was just not hanging with the right crowd, the crowd that gets exonerated at every fork in the road by a government that is for some reason loath to take action against its own.
Or was it perhaps a question of the story and the investigation into tuna corruption having taken on a European dimension, with the involvement of Spain and the European Commission. Are there two weights and two measures when it comes to corruption? Certainly.
Don’t get us wrong, the director of fisheries, for she still holds the position as she has only been suspended, deserves to have the book thrown at her and face the full brunt of the law.
But there are others too who have been caught with their fingers in the pie and who have evaded any similar treatment time after time again.
Here we refer to that dynamic duo who opened those companies in Panama – a country which just yesterday made the European Union’s blacklist of countries that have ‘strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks’ – all those moons ago, when the current administration was, in fact, still on its own honeymoon at Castile.
But just as the fisheries director is facing justice, the chickens will, in due course, also come home to roost when it comes to the dynamic duo that is Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri.
And let’s face it, the fallout from this duo’s overseas financial machinations completely eclipses the corruption being alleged against the fisheries director. The fact of the matter is that there has been an institutional failure to investigate certain people who are deemed to be untouchable, while others are left to fend for themselves.
But if others had been investigated when they should have been, and if they had, through due process, been cleared or otherwise, the problems the country is facing as well as those on the horizon would have been much fewer and much further in between.
Much of the responsibility for such inaction, as has been reported recently, falls in the lap of the police force. If the police had, for example, investigated after the outbreak of the Panama Papers, much of the turmoil could have been avoided.
The general feeling is that the police did not investigate because the pair was deemed to be untouchable, and that successive police commissioners preferred resigning rather than investigating their political masters.
But not so with the fisheries director, who probably thought she could mimic the behaviour of those in government and possibly get away just as scot-free.
Perhaps she just didn’t know that there are the touchable and the untouchables, the expendables and the non-expendables... or perhaps she just mis-categorised herself.