No one seems to have realised that, were it not for the unguarded comments by Mosta resident Joe Saliba on party financing after his ill timed vacation on Zaren Vassallo’s not-very-small boat, then the question of party financing would have remained another of those grandiose democratic proposals that appeared on the horizon and then all but disappeared from view.
Secretary General and de facto leader of the Nationalist Party, Joe Saliba was not absolutely sincere about his intentions on party financing. In my view – and it is a subjective view – he only decided to let the cat out of the bag to ward off attention from his good self.
To do so, he wrote a quick letter to the Prime Minister – thereby setting the agenda for the PM rather than allowing Gonzi set it for himself – and in a seemingly detached manner lobbed the ball onto the feet of some obscure parliamentary committee that we have still to see function.
Instead of phoning Michael Falzon, Stephen Cachia and perhaps Anglu Xuereb as party secretary equivalents, he booted the ball miles over the border into that place which is not his territory.

Parliament is not for party secretaries.

He avoided altogether any reference to the Galdes Commission, which had fallen by the wayside because of the way Tonio Borg had insisted that the limit for a donation to a political party should be Lm20,000 whereas all the other party representatives, including the one from the MLP, Alternattiva and (independent at the time) Dolores Cristina, argued that it should be Lm10,000.
Worse still, Saliba’s decision by-passed altogether the third and fourth parties, but then why should we be surprised? All this talk about widening democracy is of course no more than pure unadulterated hogwash.
This was Saliba at his best. One may not agree with him, but in writing his letter he re-directed the heat and made everyone look the other way. It also served to take away all the limelight away from his good friend Zaren.

Zaren the Nationalist diehard, as we all know thanks to sister Sunday newspaper ILLUM, donated an equal amount of money through his Cottonera Waterfront group to both the Labour and Nationalist parties.
It was only “Lm5,000 times two”, someone remarked, but more on how careful Zaren is with his money later on.
Jason Micallef, the TV-savvy Labour party secretary general, foolishly did not even care to check that Zaren was in fact the leading shareholder in the Cottonera Waterfront group, so he cheekily went ahead and made mince meat of him in his daily reportage of Saliba’s and Zaren’s holiday on both Maltastar and Super One.
It was the only bit of news that did not get any prominence in either Super One or Net, and of course all the other stations and newspapers including PBS.
Zaren’s double vision when it came to party financing seems to have completely escaped everyone’s notice.
Here was a man who apparently makes his calculations. No doubt he appears every inch the Nationalist darling: so much so, that everyone has now been told he is a very close friend of Joe Saliba… despite the fact that, when I knew Joe Saliba years ago, it was Joe Azzopardi and Peter Serracino Inglott that he hung around with rather than the up-and-coming Zaren.

But back to Zaren. In typical entrepreneurial spirit, he also donated to the Labour party, but in doing so he miscalculated Jason Micallef’s “intelligence” – intelligence not as in IQ, but as in knowing about what is happening within your own party. Jason, it seems, does not check who his party sponsors are. If he did, he would discover ic-Caqnu and Zaren are but two of many.
Only God knows who the party financiers are. And that in itself should have been a good enough reason for party financing to have been on the top of Gonzi’s agenda when he was elected party leader.
But Zaren’s unconditional respect for Joe Saliba should not be doubted in any way. When a former employee at the Nationalist party club borrowed Lm500 from Zaren Vassallo, Zaren – as the judicial proceedings show on the very public internet – made it a point to get his Lm500 back. But he could not, and he did not ask his lawyer to issue a garnishee order against Joe Saliba, who was this chap’s employer.
Now, in my life and against my better judgment I have sort of given Lm500 to so-called friends in need and never seen a penny in return, but I have decided to let bygones be bygones. One learns from one’s mistakes, I guess.
But no: Zaren is a man of principle and as my Great Aunt would say in her inimitable wisdom, the more money they have the more they find it difficult to part with.
Well, Zaren and his Lm500 would have ended there, had this former employee not left the employment of Joe Saliba and commenced with this very company, only to leave later on.
And yes, Zaren promptly asked his lawyer to issue a garnishee order against this company, when he could have done this earlier against Joe Saliba.
Now if anyone is looking for a definition of friendship then this must be it.
It is of course not my idea of friendship, but then what the heck.

Party financing as we have seen has moved away from Joe Saliba and now is calmly debated in the newspapers like a theme subject for the Fabian society. This week, we were told by representatives of the constituted bodies – that convoluted word that refers to business people – that the tax payer should not have to shoulder more taxes to pay for party financing. It is of course a perfectly nice way of decimating a proposal.
The saga went on, then in some equally convoluted but very constituted way, the reps that chose to speak up expressed their worries that if there was an attempt to make donations to political parties transparent this would deter business people from donating to the parties.
The journalist and the representatives who spoke of course failed to understand where this reportage was going.
And it is here that we should really understand that Malta did not reinvent the wheel.
Party financing should be controlled by the State, because bona fide political parties are integral part of a democracy and they are the ones who are expected to put forward ideas and people to lead a country. Not the constituted bodies, which do not organise themselves for the benefit of the nation, but rather for the benefit of their members. That is why most European countries have laws that give financial support to political parties. Political parties may be full of prima donnas but until someone comes along a finds a better solution for parliamentary democracy I suggest we all shut up.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, having transparency in donations will serve to remove the perceptions, true or false, of nepotism and favouritism, and of course allegations of corruption.
So if I have learnt anything from the events as they unfolded in the last weeks, it is that friendship has no limits.
It is infinite: it starts on a boat and continues with a Lm5,000 donation. And no matter what, even though Zaren had issued a garnishee order against this company for Lm500, I still respect him and would love to embrace him as a friend!