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Storm in a teacup The Commissioner for Vo luntary Organisations, Prof. Kenneth Wain, expects the President of the Republic of Malta Dr George Abela to fill in an application for Enrolment of an Organisation as a Voluntary Organisation issued under the law dealing with voluntary organizations and to submit it for his scrutiny. I invite you to tell me if you know of any head of State who has to humiliate himself or to subject himself to a public official if not to Parliament. I would like to see the Queen having to make such an application to the Commissioner for Voluntary Organisations in the UK! It is very odd how the Commissioner, who took office in December 2007, saw nothing wrong in the Malta Community Chest Fund when it was under the Presidency of the President Emeritus Dr Edward Fenech Adami and it was more than two years later that he woke up and splashed about his discovery that the MCCF under the President George Abela is not within the law. The Commissioner has money to waste on engaging private lawyers when he is entitled to make use of the services of the office of the Attorney General. As a public officer we expect him to publish the accounts so that the public will know where and how is the public money in his portfolio being spent. The story was spun as a political party spins any scoop about the opposition with the faithful receiving the message and parroting the voice of the Commissioner. After all, if the Commissioner engaged a private lawyer he paid him from public funds and the public therefore expects him to publish the advice given to him by this private lawyer – whose name Prof. Wain is refusing to divulge, when by law he is a public official and bound to not only publish the name but also the advice. The Attorney General is the highest authority in Malta regarding legal matters and his advice is supreme: that is what we were always told by the same media which are now trying to defuse the role of the Attorney General. His Office is set up by the Constitution of Malta and the Commissioner has no right to query the advice of the Attorney General even if he does not agree with it because he is a public official and by law he has to abide by the advice of the Attorney General. It was very silly of the Commissioner to refer to a private lawyer for advice because the advice of the Attorney General was not sweet music to his ears. Needless to say if you go to a lawyer and you brief him that you have this advice and that you do not agree with it, your lawyer will find ways and means to accommodate the client and in this case – having a law which is only two years old and which has room for interpretation – it is not difficult to give the Commissioner the music that he wants to hear. However, you will be forgetting that the President of Malta is an office regulated by the Constitution, and the Constitution of Malta is above the law which Prof. Wain is trying to protect. Perhaps what we are missing is that the President of Malta is the highest person in authority in Malta and he is the head of the Malta Community Chest Fund; but more importantly that he heads this fund precisely because he is the President of Malta and not vice versa. It is not the same with voluntary organisations which are set up voluntarily: the Malta Community Chest Fund is part of the portfolio of the Office of the President of the Republic. This is the distinction that the Commissioner for NGO’s is failing to make; which distinction it seems that he accepted when President Fenech Adami was in office but not now that there is President George Abela. As otherwise how can you explain the two-year silence of the commissioner before he blew his trumpet and went public with his controversy? I am sure that it was not wise of him to do so and his job was to ensure respect for the law and for the Office of the President and to volunteer a solution on the matter and not take the confrontational approach against the highest authority in Malta, something which until Prof. Wain came into the picture was totally unheard of. Had Prof. Wain handled the issue when he took office on 11 December 2007, we would have believed in his independence and impartiality and in his genuine love for his law and his office; but to wait until the presidency of Dr Fenech Adami is over to voice his concern is something which does not reflect well on the Commissioner. I am sure that had Dr Fenech Adami remained, President Prof. Wain would have either continued to keep his silence or he would have sought different means to solve the impasse. The same applies to those sections of the media who have joined the chorus of Prof. Wain and are playing to his song now... having never questioned before how much of l-Istrina goes to PBS and to the organizers of l-Istrina, how the beneficiaries are chosen by the PBS board, how the applications for the submissions of applications by the beneficiaries was only lately made public, how the accounts were before never published, why most of the donations went to the political district where the President’s political son came from, etc, etc. It is truly a case of not stomaching the success of this Presidency and full stop, because let us face it: as stated in the immortal words of Tennessee Williams character Blanche Dubois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, charities and their beneficiaries (as well as Southern Belles) depend upon the kindness of strangers. And in the case of the Malta Community Chest Fund it also depends on the kindness of the government because it receives help in kind from the government in the form of office space, stationery, salaries, etc. And this is what does not make it qualify as a non-government voluntary organization under the law. I wonder what Her Majesty the Queen would tell Prof. Wain if she were still our Head of State!
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European Elections special editions 01 June 2009 |
Managing editor Saviour Balzan | Tel. ++356 21382741 | Fax: ++356 21385075 | Email