I am still wondering whether Tonio Fenech has a problem with addition and subtraction, apart from everything else. Just for the record, earlier this week the Minister of Finance, after having belittled the scandal over his jetsetting freebies and the choice of his home decorators, announced that the shipyards would be sold for €67 million.
That figure included the upfront figure of €5.7 million MaltaToday published last Sunday. The rest was an annual rent over a period of 30 years for €61 million. Of course, the minister failed to explain the mumbo-jumbo of numbers to the reporters attending the conference. Today it claims we were wrong about our figures.
Out of the blue, on Friday (three days after announcing the Palumbo award) after a series of questions from MaltaToday, the finance minister alters the figure to €90 million.
Yes, from €67 million to €90 million.
I am trying to understand if there is a story here, apart from the fact that Tonio Fenech has a serious credibility problem. This government is truly run by boy scouts.
Yet, beyond this mix-up with numbers, the more interesting story involves the questions related to the role of MIMCOL and the people who run MIMCOL in this privatisation drive. If anyone of you has the patience to read through this story, do so now on pages 12 and 13.
What is even more interesting is to see what the rental rates offered at the shipyards and Manoel Island are and then to compare them to the rental rates offered by Malta Enterprise for industrial space.
So when you see that in the last years we have thrown away over €750 million to write off the debt at the dockyard and yet another €50 million to pay for its redundancies, we are perfectly entitled to ask the question on whether this government is doing the right thing at the ‘yards.
In this case there is little doubt in my mind that Fenech apparently neither has the competence nor the foresight to drive this privatisation.
Pandora’s box It is clear that today there is no thinking behind government strategy. Cabinet ministers talking to this newspaper speak of a Prime Minister who hardly converses with them or links with their ministerial work. Many ministers are like goldfish in a dolphin tank, swimming in an ocean of water and without any real direction.
They talk of a Prime Minister who only takes advice from his personal assistant Edgar Galea Curmi, and this advice continues to encourage the Prime Minister to take on a siege mentality mode.
“They are more petrified of the media than the Labour party,” one minister told me.
“And they take everything personally. Any criticism from MaltaToday is seen as a personal attack.”
Which goes to explain why the over-reaction to Robert Musumeci’s probable candidature in the bye-election was so badly mishandled.
Once again, today’s front-page article refers to the Prime Minister talking to Musumeci. It was a curious event. Instead of finding the time to meet up with ministers and key persons in his government, Lawrence Gonzi is simply concerned about his political survival.
Now let us be fair on this one.
Gonzi has every right to prefer one candidate to another. In the present situation, he is very lucky to still be around as Prime Minister. He has a good chunk of the parliamentary group opposing him. They talk behind his back, badmouth him and question his leadership but they still do not have the courage to do what it takes to dethrone him. In this respect, he is completely justified in calling their bluff and asking them to back him or shut up.
So the very fact that he may prefer others to Robert Musumeci is perfectly understandable.
The problem (and there are two crucial ones) is that the Prime Minister has gone about the whole issue in the wrong way.
The first problem is his decision to ride on the scurrilous and defamatory comments posted on the internet to question Musumeci’s integrity and credentials for the post. An incalculable mistake that will continue to raise the legitimate question: Is the campaign to hit out at people’s personal lives sanctioned by people at the top?
I should be more specific. Does the Prime Minister agree with all this? If he does, then we should really start questioning what this is all about. He probably cannot distinguish between criticism and bile-driven commentary.
The second issue deals with the Prime Minister’s conversation about Musumeci and reveals the extent of his lack of appreciation for the thinking behind the electoral system.
The Prime Minister should have been told by his one-and-only advisor Edgar Galea Curmi that Robert Musumeci does not or did not have a chance to get elected in the bye-election.
It is of course a question of adding numbers which would be simple to explain if one extracts the transferable votes from the John Dalli pile of votes.
So if this was the case, why did the PM decide to waste time and space with Robert? And why did he have to raise matters which did not need to be questioned in the first place? Is there is something we do not know?
Why did the Prime Minister have to waste an afternoon discussing whether Musumeci should stand or not, when his chances of being elected are next to nil? This goes to prove that something is awfully wrong in the Prime Minister’s mindset or set of priorities.
When Joe Zahra, at one time Lou Bondì’s sidekick, came out with a fantastic and surreal story implicating John Dalli and others in Mater Dei contract kickbacks, the PM appears to have believed him. Well, that is what John Dalli said.
It was either a case of ‘gullible him’ or ‘wishful thinking’ him.
So now we know that both PN candidates (that is Robert Musumeci and Dr Peter Micallef) have sort of decided to stand to take John Dalli’s seat. Musumeci is not 100% convinced that he should stand, but then his friends say that he most probably will.
This is perfectly comprehensible, more so after the incredible abuse he and his partner Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera experienced this week.
Which is why this whole incident could lead to the opening of a Pandora’s box on the private lives of everyone – which would be a very fascinating thing indeed – most of all, for all those hypocrites and bigots who have clearly forgotten what lies in their wardrobe and clearly believe that they are clones of the Virgin Mary.
It is no longer about bad practices or bad governance but about a malaise in politics that is becoming a very serious concern for everyone irrespective of their political leanings.
I would like to believe that we can discuss politics in a more serene way, see everyone’s point of view and respect the roles of each and every one of us: whether we are the press, the Prime Minister, a candidate seeking election, a political party seeking unity and the whole network of political friends and foes.
Question and answer I am in full agreement with the report in In-Nazzjon about the question and answer sessions put to Joseph Muscat. It was said that the Super One journalists who asked questions were specifically groomed for the session. How very surprising!
I agree this control obsession in the Labour party is counterproductive.
But I wonder what is happening on the other side. Precisely the same thing is happening with the Nationalists. The Prime Minister is to be interviewed by Stephen Calleja from The Malta Independent. And yet everyone in the business knows that Mr Calleja has two great passions: Berlusconi’s Milan and the Nationalist party. I wonder which one of the two he is better at: talking about Milan or offering an interesting interview with the PM?
When are our politicians going to grow up and realise that they cannot control the media forever? When we are going to grow up and move away from there tribal politics which are demeaning democracy?
Controlled PBS In their press review, PBS said last Sunday that they could not find a copy of MaltaToday and Illum at the newsstands and therefore could not comment on it. It was of course a feeble excuse. Good to know that all newspapers printed in Malta are distributed by the same company.
Has it got this bad at PBS? Are they so afraid of reporting the truth?
Well, we should not be too surprised: the Edgar Galea Curmi brigade has absolutely no idea what it means to deal with the free press.
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