Muscat’s legacy haunts Abela
When Daphne Caruana Galizia broke the news on major corruption scandals, we expected resignations and swift justice. It would have been a basic consequence of accountability that when a corrupt politician is caught swindling the taxpayer, they step aside and let someone else fix their mess.
But the corruption scandals that Daphne exposed were not errors or aberrations. As leaked documents show, they were all part of Joseph Muscat’s infamous ‘road map’. Offshore structures were set up to be plugged into opaque, ready-made deals involving several millions in taxpayers’ money to be squandered in fake hospitals deals, enormous windfall profits and inflated hedging agreements.
It would have been impossible to come clean on one corruption scandal without setting off a chain reaction with the others. Those implicated in the same web of corruption clung to power for as long as they could and when one fell, the others followed suit. Rather than clean up its house, the Labour Party in power instrumentalised the state to run a demonisation campaign against anyone who challenged an inch of their might.
The state takeover that Muscat engineered enabled a deliberate conflation of the state and Muscat himself. But if Muscat could never be greater than Malta, the story was different with the Labour Party. He did not tolerate checks and balances and this includes the internal checks within the Labour Party itself.
Riding the wave of Muscat’s selfaggrandisement meant ignoring the obvious corruption and systematic abuse of power. Those who were willing to remain silent about corruption allowed the Labour Party to become subservient to Muscat.
Muscat maintains that he was never involved in corruption. Yet, he refuses to explain the many red flags around the extensive involvement of Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and Muscat himself in every dodgy deal that his administration entered into on our behalf.
That cabinet allowed itself to be regularly circumvented evidences its timidity – and complicity – in the face of Muscat’s egotistical intolerance to scrutiny. And even if Mizzi bypassed the cabinet, as documented by the auditor general, it is impossible to imagine how he also went behind Muscat’s back.
Instead of acting on what journalists were exposing, the messenger was allowed to be killed. So crime and corruption continued to fester, until Muscat’s hold on power became untenable even by his own distorted standards. His resignation triggered heavy interference into the process to appoint his successor, banking on the assumption that he could maintain his influence from beyond the political grave. If this effect lasted at all, it was short-lived.
The situation now is that Muscat’s status as invictus has all but crumbled away, leaving behind a party that is struggling to emerge in a better state than its former leader. His successor has stumbled, trying to assert control, with his faltering attempts at renegotiating the hospitals deal forcing him to distance himself instead.
Last Sunday, while Muscat and Mizzi battled reports over the failed deal that was riddled in corruption, Robert Abela could only muster the narrative that, from day one, he said: “the hospitals deal needed to be analysed.”
While Labour struggles to deal with the ramifications of the largest public contract in Maltese political history being a fraud, Muscat has never seemed to stray so far away from his indestructible image than now.
The latest revelations have placed him front and centre as having benefitted from shady consultancy contracts from the same people whose wrongdoing caused the hospitals concession to be struck down by the court.
Needless to say that this was a possibility that was contemplated by Mizzi and which was indeed realised.
Muscat’s arsenal has shrunk considerably, as has his list of powerful friends. In the face of criminal allegations of bribery, the most he could do was attack the magistrate on grounds of partiality.
His attempt to explain his half-a-million-euros consultancy is meagre at best. The hospitals concession was so shambolic that nobody in the Labour Party can claim with any credibility that it was done to deliver an iota of benefit for the country. The next best bet is Muscat’s personal financial interest.
That Muscat claims his work was legitimate is completely irrelevant. He began receiving money from Vitals through a Swiss company for his ‘consulting’ services just weeks after his resignation. If his performance as prime minister is anything to go by, then this contract too stinks of a pre-cooked deal to the detriment of the interests of taxpayers.
For all his efforts to elude scrutiny, sooner or later, Muscat will have to answer for every penny squandered to corruption. There is no evidence of any investment in our hospitals but instead of a massive heist of public funds, whose money trail leads to the personal slush fund of suspect fraudsters’ luxury hotel stays, fine dining bills, deluxe cars, private schooling and vet fees.
While the clock ticks, Muscat can rest assured that nobody doubts that his triumphant entry into Castille was nothing but a cynical display of selfinterested conmanship. His bedridden legacy is condemned to remain confined within the deteriorating walls of St Luke’s Hospital.
Muscat himself would also do well to get used to confinement.
“Muscat’s arsenal has shrunk considerably, as has his list of powerful friends
David Casa is a Nationalist Party MEP.