Opinion: Power trip

Bully Bob is at it again, intimidating and threatening to use his power to deprive citizens of more of their rights.  This time, he threatened the very man he appointed Standards Commissioner, former Chief Justice Joseph Azzopardi.

Commissioner Azzopardi received a complaint about Abela from Arnold Cassola about the driving licences scandal. Abela had defended his administration’s clientelism.  The Commissioner ruled that the complaint was justified and that Abela should be investigated.

Abela berated the Commissioner in his reply, dictating what he should and shouldn’t do and threatening that if he didn’t comply, he would simply change the law.

When the Commissioner gave Abela the opportunity to examine the evidence and submit his response, Abela arrogantly replied, “There’s no need for a hearing because my reply of 29 November contains exhaustive submissions.”

Abela’s increasingly belligerent style, his in-your-face abrasiveness, and his capricious abuse of power are really starting to grate. He keeps picking fights with everybody – journalists, Opposition MPs, NGOs, public figures, MEPs, even fellow EU leaders.

Now, he’s turned his wrath on to the Standards Commissioner for doing his duty.  Abela’s hostility wasn’t reserved for the Commissioner.

With petulant defiance, he lashed out at Cassola, who had the audacity to point out the bleeding obvious – that it’s entirely inappropriate for the prime minister to publicly support blatant clientelism, particularly when that clientelism was the subject of police investigations.

“It’s evident from the content of the messages themselves that what the Minister did was what’s expected of a minister,” Abela said in defence of Minister Ian Borg, who sent repeated messages to Clint Mansueto, the Transport Malta licensing director charged with corruption.

In one of the messages, Borg gave Mansueto the name of a member of Labour’s student organisation, Pulse, and said that he’d been treated unfairly when he failed his driving test twice. Mansueto’s notorious reply,  “Your friend is my friend”, says it all.

“I am maybe one of those who receives most messages from people to help them with their needs… health, education, other daily needs, that is one of the most important functions of a politician in the Maltese political system,” Abela said.

He was normalising his administration’s “hidden” policy of “helping the people”. What he was really defending is preferential treatment in the form of expedited driving tests or by ensuring select individuals passed their test even if “the vehicle was splattered with blood.”

Instead of condemning clientelism, Abela defended Ian Borg and his customer care officers.  He commended their “work” and encouraged them to keep “helping the people”.  When an equivocal condemnation of malignant clientelism was required, Abela mounted a staunch defence of the corrosive practice.

The whole country knows that if you want a “favour”, you resort to the minister, the Labour Party club, the ministry customer care, or speak to the Minister’s driver. That’s what Abela promotes: a backwater culture of dependency and patronage where people feel eternally indebted to the politician even if what they request is theirs by right.

It is telling that Abela referred specifically to “the Maltese political system”, implying Malta has its own set of values and principles. Abela promotes the “Maltese political system” of eternal gratitude to the benevolent leader because it benefits him.

It turns out the benevolent leader can be pretty nasty – and his malevolence and retribution came into sharp view in his communication with the Commissioner. He accused the Commissioner of being coerced by Cassola.

“First of all, I wish to express my disapproval of the phrase “to acquire a driving licence” used in the second page of your letter, which I hardly believe was put in by yourself”, Abela insolently commented. He rudely ordered the Commissioner not “to reach frivolous and baseless conclusions that the complainant (Cassola) usually loves to reach.”

With breezy contempt, Abela also said, “Therefore, you don’t need to be some professor to recognise the manipulation of the facts… Nowhere does it result that I failed to respect the principles mentioned in your letter”.

He accused the Commissioner of trying “to control the content and narrative of the replies that an MP can give the media”.

“God forbid”, Abela said, that “the political content becomes subject to the subjective opinion of the Commissioner”.

The Standards Commissioner has very limited powers – one of those is determining whether a complaint merits investigation.  Yet Abela appropriated that power from the Commissioner.

He told the Commissioner: “The complaint is highly frivolous and, with all due respect, does not merit any investigation”. He added that “it does not take much time for this complaint to be rejected”.

He didn’t stop there.  He denigrated Cassola.  “It’s clear the complainant, despite the public’s consistently clear judgement against him, is trying to obtain what he cannot gain with democratic means by other means”.

Unable to contain his loathing for Cassola, Abela insisted, “The law is consistently being abused by the complainant, where it is abundantly clear he is filing multiple frivolous complaints because until now the law does not impose sanctions, and then when his frivolous complaints are rejected, more frivolous assertions are made against your office”.

Abela concluded with his sucker punch –  “I understand that if this abuse continues, the remedy will be legislative”.  In other words, ‘if Cassola continues to annoy me, I’ll change the law and make him pay’.

Abela’s intimidation worked. Despite categorically declaring that Abela’s statements “can be interpreted as a defence of practices amounting to clientelism”, “the undersigned (the Commissioner) does not believe the Prime Minister should be found guilty of ethics breaches”.

That’s utterly illogical and deeply disappointing. But at least the Commissioner had the courage not to capitulate entirely to Abela. He rejected Abela’s hysterical accusations that Cassola was abusing the law, saying, “The complainant exercised a right given to him by the law.”

The Commissioner warned Abela that “if the law is changed to limit this right, it will be a retrograde step in the development of governance institutions”.

That won’t stop Abela—indeed, it might encourage him. But the Commissioner’s public chastisement of Abela—“I decide if a complaint is frivolous or abusive,” not you—gives a tiny boost to our democracy.

Maybe the Commissioner won’t let Abela walk all over him after all.