The country knows – Kevin Cassar

Silvio Schembri just gave away public land worth over €12 million for the development of hundreds of apartments for just €400,000 annually to a company whose majority shareholder is Paul Attard.

Attard built the apartment that Schembri uses as his district office.  Despite his promises, Schembri hasn’t provided evidence he’s paying any rent.

Michael Zammit Tabona’s Fortina Hotel illegally occupied and developed a lido on the Sliema seafront.  Instead of taking action against the Fortina, Schembri sought to sanction the illegalities and to get Parliament to hand the land over to Zammit Tabona.

A timber factory was being built illegally on government land in Kordin leased to Kurt Buhagiar and Matthew Schembri.  The Development Notification Order was never submitted. There was no commencement order on the development.

When that illegal construction came crashing down, Jean Paul Sofia was killed.  Robert Abela is now desperately resisting an embarrassing public inquiry that will expose his government’s hand behind the Kordin saga.

Those are just three of Labour’s most recent suspicious deals.  Labour’s dodgy deals keep coming thick and fast.  From the hospitals mega swindle to the ElectroGas power station and from the Mozura wind farm to the db Group ITS deal and so many more.

It came as no surprise that the Eurobarometer results published this week show the Maltese topped the list of EU citizens who feel personally affected by corruption in their daily lives. It came as no surprise that Malta saw the biggest rise in the proportion that feel corruption is widespread.  More than nine out of every 10 Maltese citizens feel that corruption is widespread.  That’s a 13% increase in just one year.

Labour finally kept its promise to make Malta the best in Europe. Sadly, it’s the best in corruption.

What’s equally worrying is that 84% of Malta’s businesses are seeing with their own eyes that corruption is hampering competition.  64% consider bribery and political connections as the easiest way to obtain public services.  35% feel that the only way to succeed in business is to have political connections. One-third of all Maltese businesses believe there is no other way to get ahead.

They should know.

Those shocking statistics point to a sad reality under Labour. Only those with political connections can succeed.

What’s even more worrying is that the majority of those businesses believe those who engage in corrupt practices will never face justice.  They know corruption is rife and that those engaging in corruption succeed – but they also know those criminals will never pay for their crimes.

And they’re right.

Despite the repeated revelations by investigative journalists of manifestly corrupt practices the police force and its commissioner fail to investigate, let alone indict. When a magisterial inquiry concluded that Ali Sadr Hasheminejad and Antoniella Gauci, the sister and daughter of Robert Abela’s canvassers, should be prosecuted, the Attorney General provided Gauci with a guarantee that she will not be prosecuted.

When 18 ministers and parliamentary secretaries were found by the Standards Commissioner to have paid tens of thousands of euros of taxpayer money to their party’s newspaper to print politically partisan adverts, Speaker of the House Anglu Farrugia, who had a casting vote, decided to reject the Commissioner’s report.

Konrad Mizzi – the subject of a damning Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit report, who set up secret financial structures in Panama and New Zealand and whose name crops up in all of Labour’s filthiest projects – still hasn’t been brought before the courts, let alone convicted.

It’s been almost two years since the Daphne Caruana Galizia public inquiry was concluded. None of its recommendations to make abuse of office and ‘associazione mafiosa’ a crime have been considered, let alone implemented.

The police commissioner simply looks the other way whenever new evidence of corrupt practices is presented to him. Reuters and The Times of Malta had to tell us who owned 17 Black. And still Angelo Gafa did nothing. The Macbridge links to Enemalta’s Chinese negotiator Chen Cheng and its links to 17 Black were also revealed by Reuters and the Times.

Still Gafa did nothing.

A magisterial inquiry found collusion and fraud in Labour’s €4 billion Vitals Global Healthcare scam – no prosecutions followed. The revelations of Yorgen Fenech’s links to the Mozura wind farm scam, despite Enemalta’s attempts to cover it up, saw no police action.

Labour’s strategy is to cover up, hide the truth, and avert any ruling – by the standards commissioner or the courts – that they’re corrupt. Labour uses the lack of convictions to refute all accusations of corruption. Where is the proof? They’re just allegations – nothing’s proven, nobody’s indicted, nobody’s guilty.

Labour’s main objective is to create the illusion that there’s no corruption, that it’s the maligned victim of a smear campaign by the establishment.

Robert Abela even had the nerve to accuse Jean Paul Sofia’s grieving mother of letting herself be “used” for political reasons.

Labour has been entirely successful in shielding its own from criminal prosecution and convictions.

But it failed spectacularly in convincing the public that it’s not corrupt. The vast majority of the public knows they’re corrupt. The vast majority of businesses know the system is rigged.

Labour is losing its public relations battle.  Without thought control, Labour is condemned to an inevitable catastrophic defeat.

So expect Labour to ramp up efforts to stifle those who keep exposing their rotten deals – the journalists.  Expect Labour to intensify assaults on its critics.

The recent EU Commission report condemned Labour’s failure to implement measures to protect journalists.  It denounced Labour’s failure to make any progress in terms of prosecutions of high-profile politicians. That report declared that Malta’s justice system has “further deteriorated”.

Labour will do anything to change the conviction of the whole population that they’re corrupt. Labour won’t do it by rooting out corruption – it can’t. Corruption is the glue that binds Labour’s fragile coalition of crookedness together.

What it will do is throttle those who keep exposing its corruption. It will increase its secrecy, refute any public inquiry that may expose more of its rottenness, resist every freedom of information request and avoid answering journalists’ questions.  It will use its domination of the media to harass critics. It has access to state resources and it’s not afraid to use them for the benefit of the party.

The biggest tragedy is that Labour keeps looting the country before our very eyes with complete impunity.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The nation has realised Labour is duping it. The key question is: For how much longer will the nation let Labour get away with it?