Some things in life are entirely predictable. One of these is the reaction of any government minister when serious irregularities in public tendering procedures – especially when these involve hundreds of millions of euros in taxpayers’ money – are dragged into the cruel light of day.
On Monday, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech gave us a textbook example of his government’s usual reaction to such developments. Soon after the Auditor General’s report into the Delimara contract was tabled in Parliament – a report which points towards serious breaches of procedure, none of which has so far been satisfactorily explained – Fenech issued a terse statement to the effect that ‘no evidence for corruption’ had been found, despite allegations made repeatedly by the Opposition for over a year.
As far as the government is concerned, the lack of any ‘smoking gun’ – to borrow UN weapons inspector Hans Blix’s immortal phrase from 2003 – is all there is to comment upon in the Auditor General’s report. And sure enough, the usual friendly media echoed his response to the letter in their front-page headlines yesterday: with The Times and In-Nazzjon running different language versions of a story which was otherwise virtually identical in every single detail.
However, both Fenech and the newspapers which parrot his opinions appear to be overlooking a number of important facts.
The first is that the Constitutionally appointed office of the Auditor General has neither the remit, jurisdiction nor even the tools at its disposal to properly investigate allegations of corruption. The most the Auditor can do – and did do, in this instance – is scrutinize the process leading to the award of a €200 million contract, and determine whether legal procedure was followed to the letter.
This brings us to the second point overlooked in Fenech’s reaction: i.e., that the Auditor’s report, while stopping short of proving ‘corruption’ for reasons outlined above, nonetheless made a number of very serious observations – the least of which would have serious and lasting repercussions, in a country which respected the basic principles of transparency and accountability.
These include the fact that, in awarding the contract to BWSC, the Contracts Department clearly sidestepped ordinary procedure on at least two counts: i.e., that the failed bidders were not duly notified as required by law; and (more importantly) that the tender document itself was not reissued altogether, following a change to the specifications concerning emissions.
Both these points are central to the judicial procedures opened against the department by unsuccessful bidders, Bateman.
Elsewhere, the Auditor General observed that outgoing Enemalta Chairman Alex Tranter should have resigned on account of a conflict of interest – as in fact this newspaper has been stressing since last November. The report observes also that Tranter had ‘declared’ his conflict of interest: significantly, however, he chose to do so only after appointing the adjudicating committee.
Considering that Tranter had vested interests in one of the companies tendering for the construction works of the same extension contract – Vassallo Builders, which duly won the bid – it is little short of astonishing that he should also have retained his chairmanship of the Enemalta Corporation throughout the tendering process: a process which involved selecting such companies for lucrative contracts to be paid out of the public purse.
And finally, the Auditor’s report also illustrates with great precision that the main witness to proceedings – former Enemalta employee Joe Mizzi, who appears to have also doubled up as an agent for the successful bidders – withheld information from the investigators... citing ‘amnesia’, of all things, as an excuse.
In the light of this fact, the first consideration outlined above assumes far greater significance. It is evident from the report itself that the Auditor General lacks the judicial and temporal authority to coerce such witnesses to collaborate, or even just to answer a simple question.
This alone should indicate why an Auditor General report – no matter how detailed and exhaustive - cannot possibly be taken as evidence or otherwise of corruption.
On the other hand, it can (and in this case, amply does) provide a clear indication that a contract may be vitiated on a number of counts. And by apparently dismissing these damning conclusions out of hand, Tonio Fenech is not only disregarding serious evidence of wrongdoing within a department for which is now responsible... but more seriously still, he is also undermining public faith in the office of the Auditor General itself.
Meanwhile, there is yet another point that Fenech and his friends in the media appear to constantly overlook in such matters. The inhabitants of Malta are no longer the ill-informed and largely provincial people they may have been one or two decades ago.
Ironically, the same Nationalist government can take credit for this, as accession to the European Union has served also to raise levels of public expectation on matters such as ‘good governance’ (a previously unknown expression).
There is now a growing demand for greater transparency and accountability at all levels, and it is clear from both the Auditor’s report and the Finance Minister’s reaction that the present situation leaves much to be desired.
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