The Europe we joined and the Malta we became

Former Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas has had his parliamentary immunity stripped and will face criminal charges over his unexplained wealth.

He allegedly accumulated €344,000 over 14 years. His wife has already been criminally charged. The probe into the Prime Minister’s unexplained wealth was triggered by investigative reporting by a Lithuanian broadcaster.  Those stories focused on the close links of the Prime Minister with a local businessman with vast real estate holdings. That businessman sold the Prime Minister an apartment at a loss of €90,000.

Does that sound familiar?

The similarities end there.

The Prime Minister’s brother was also arrested in a separate criminal investigation by Lithuania’s Financial Crime Investigation Service into embezzlement of EU funds and corruption.  A company owned by the Prime Minister’s sister-in-law was also subjected to a law enforcement raid.

The Lithuanian police didn’t give their Prime Minister or his family any special privileges. The prosecutor general, the equivalent of Malta’s Attorney General, went to parliament to request Lithuanian MPs strip their former prime minister of immunity so she could charge him. Lithuanian MPs acceded to the prosecutor general’s request and stripped his immunity, paving the way for justice to take its course.

That’s like some futuristic fiction story for us in Malta.  It reminds us how far we are from other EU member states, despite having been a member for over two decades.

In Malta, we don’t vote in parliament to lift immunity for our politicians; we vote overwhelmingly to protect them.  We had a Speaker who, for years, has been the shield for politicians found by the standards commissioner to have breached ethical standards. He’s actively intervened to stop MPs asking questions and demanding accountability from ministers and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

We’ve got a prime minister who has abolished the requirement for cabinet members to declare their assets, ensuring that any unexplained wealth is not only not investigated by law enforcement but also conveniently concealed from the public. Robert Abela has actively enabled his cabinet members to abuse their power, safe from the pubic’s gaze.

In one depressing case after another, we have seen the most outrageous abuse by cabinet members go unpunished and even condoned.  Amanda Muscat, the wife of former minister Clayton Bartolo, was given a lucrative job with an exorbitant pay package when she was neither qualified nor experienced for it, and she never did any of the work she was meant to do.

The Standards Commissioner confirmed that she was given a phantom job.  The Commissioner found that her then-boyfriend, Bartolo, was motivated by personal gain. With Minister Clint Camilleri, her salary was increased twice: from €39,413 to €62,000, then to €68,000. She was given a €15,000 expertise allowance, which was raised to €20,000.  The Standards Commissioner said, “A policy consultant should carry out consultancy, not secretarial work”.

While Bartolo claimed that when he entered into a relationship with Muscat, they decided it would be better for her to leave her role with his ministry.  The Standards commissioner noted, “That would have been appropriate and correct if it were true”.

Bartolo and Camilleri made it appear that she had been transferred to Gozo, but “in fact she continued to factually serve as Minister Bartolo’s personal assistant”.

The Prime Minister defended the whole scam, claiming that she had done some work, except not the work she was meant to do.

The Standards Commissioner stated: “If the minister defends those actions or even makes statements that do not correspond with the facts, there is no doubt he would be shouldering personal responsibility for what happened”.

But that wasn’t the only example of the flagrant abuse by Abela’s cabinet. Rosianne Cutajar was paid tens of thousands of euro for an ITS consultancy job described as “fraudulent” and “irregular” by the National Audit Office (NAO). Her appointment was backdated so she could earn even more money for doing nothing.  She was paid at rates exceeding the threshold.  More importantly, she wasn’t remotely qualified for the job to which she was appointed.

Her appointment was “in breach of the policies and procedures” regulating public sector employment.  “The financial beneficiary of this irregularity was Cutajar; however, the deceit was abetted through the actions of the CEO of ITS”, the NAO pointed out.

Cutajar even failed to declare her income for tax purposes.  Yet no criminal action was taken against her. Instead, Abela welcomed her back to Labour’s fold.

Minister Anton Refalo and his wife benefited from €270,000 in EU funds to turn a once-illegal ODZ building in Qala into a “yoga boutique hotel”. The European Regional Development Funds (EDRF) were allocated to her by Malta’s national authorities despite the fact that the repeated illegal interventions on that property were not sanctioned by the Planning Authority until later.

Although the Environment and Resources Authority (ERA) insisted that the “illegal” building should not be given a permit, Refalo’s boutique hotel received approval from the Planning Authority.  Now we’ve discovered that Refalo has been occupying another property that once housed Mafia boss Toto Riina, despite the fact that Refalo supposedly has no legal title on the property, does not pay rent and has no lease agreement. Yet our police have not bothered to look into the suspicious arrangements.

And if we’re talking about unexplained wealth, we’ve got the prime example of Roderick Galdes, who miraculously accumulated a portfolio of 13 properties spread over the UK, Sicily, mainland Italy, Malta and Gozo despite earning just €60,000 annually. Yet no financial crimes officer knocked on Galdes’ door.

Abela scrambled to protect all this abuse by abolishing the ministerial asset declarations and by leaping to their defence. He has his own questions to answer on his ongoing project developments – a mansion in Żejtun and a boutique hotel in Gozo.

As for Malta’s Attorney General, don’t expect her to address parliament to demand immunity be stripped from our ministers, as happened in Lithuania.  Don’t expect the Police Commissioner to call in Abela’s cabinet members for interrogation.  We can only wonder whether Malta will ever pull itself out of this medieval feudalism and become truly European.