The four pillars of corruption

Please read this article on the World Economic Forum website. The writer gives the ‘four pillars of corruption’ as:

1. the corrupters
2. the corrupt
3. impunity
4. tolerance

You will notice that those who corrupt others are ranked higher than those who are corrupted.

This is an argument I make all the time. I find it literally unbearable to have to deal with ways of thinking, speaking and reasoning, in Malta, which either completely remove the corrupter from the equation or do not understand that his behaviour is criminal and far worse than that of the person he corrupts or seeks to corrupt. People bang on about how corrupt members of the government were in the 1970s and 1980s. They go on about Patrick Holland and Danny Cremona and Lorry Sant and the rest of the fraud squad – some of whom are back in power today – and my reaction is that it was only possible for them to be corrupt because others were corrupting them or colluding in their corruption.

Every bribe Il-Fusellu took was a bribe paid by somebody in business who sees himself as above board and who would be horrified to hear himself described as ‘corrupt’. But all those who paid bribes in the 1970s and 1980s were (are, because many of them are still alive and in business) as corrupt as the people they corrupted.

And if they paid bribes to people in government or their sidekicks and henchmen in the 1970s and 1980s, they will not be averse to doing the same today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. Only a really poor judge of character will fail to understand this.

The mantra of such people is ‘xi tridni naghmel, dak business heqq’. But it’s not business, it’s corruption. Even if the corruption saves your business, it remains corruption. You are an enabler, a participant in crime.

Maltese people do not understand this. This grows out of a culture in which you do what you can get away with to get what you want. It’s excused: kullhadd irid jiekol, hux?

Situations which can lead to the perception of corruption fail to be understood, or they are ignored, which is dangerous. When the Finance Minister of the time went to watch a football match with the prominent businessmen Joe Gasan and (the late) George Fenech, travelling in a private jet owned by the latter, everyone focused on the Finance Minister’s actions without questioning Joe Gasan’s or George Fenech’s behaviour. So did the Labour Party (and two years ago we found out why).

I was more interested in Gasan’s and Fenech’s bad behaviour and lack of good manners (putting somebody in a position which compromises them, for your own personal advantage, is terrible behaviour). “Everybody is blaming the Finance Minister for accepting your invitation, but I blame you for making that invitation in the first place,” I told Joe Gasan when I ran into him at a dinner-thing a couple of weeks after the furore began. “It was wrong of you, and you should have known it would get him into the most enormous trouble, but you didn’t care because your interests came first.” He apparently considered this to be a very novel view, and reacted accordingly.

People like that operate in a world in which only they and their business-targets exist. All else can be collateral damage. If they get the Finance Minister into trouble and contribute to the demise of one party in government, they will simply form an alliance with the other party, build a power station and extend invitations to the new ministers who probably know better than to accept them – not because they have principles about corruption and cronyism or the perception of corruption and cronyism (they clearly don’t), but because they don’t want ‘tu quoque’ stories in the media.

Which brings us to 3. impunity and 4. tolerance. Corruption is so easy in Malta because the corrupt and the corrupted can behave with impunity. And corruption is tolerated at all levels except where politicians of the opposing party are concerned.

Suffice it to say that I have had to explain, in great and painstaking detail, why a police inspector should not 1. be in business, 2. be in business with a sleazy operator like Joe Gaffarena, 3. be in business with an ambassador, 4. be in business with an ambassador who is in business with a sleazy operator like Joe Gaffarena, 5. be in business with the father-in-law of a man he is investigating for murder, 6. be in business with the father of a woman whose lover was the murder victim in the murder he is investigating, 7. do all this when his father, who is in business with the same people, is deputy commissioner and acting Commissioner of Police, 8. that this means the acting Commissioner of Police was corrupt at a different level because he allowed it to happen for the reason that he was involved too and the corrupt policemen are his sons…I won’t go on.

At least people seemed to understand the corruption involved when I discovered that the very same police inspector is a shareholder in a company with Hugo/Ugo Chetcuti, whose shares are held by his son, who was only 19 when the company was incorporated. But that’s only because of what people think when they hear the name ‘Hugo Chetcuti’.

There is corruption everywhere in the world, literally everywhere, and at every level. The difference is that in Malta people have a corrupt attitude towards corruption. They blank it. They tolerate it. The powers are not really separate. Institutions are weak. The police operate as an extension of the government. Judges and magistrates are politically appointed. It’s a dreadful situation, ripe and designed for abuse and corruption.

When people are overwhelmingly wealthy and put on displays of wealth, Maltese people never ask the obvious questions about where the money is coming from. This is not a business or entrepreneurial culture, so people literally do not understand how money is made. They think people with a business just turn on a money-tap and money pours out. So if somebody is flashing around in a Maserati and buying enormous villas and whack-off motor-yachts, he must obviously have made the wherewithal by selling sushi and tapas.

The ambassador of a European Union member state told me recently that he reads this website to find out what is really going on. He wasn’t in Malta two years ago, when the news broke that the prime minister is leasing his own family saloon car to the government for his official use at 7,000 euros a year. He found out about it through a chance reference I made a couple of months ago.

“There is corruption in my country, you could say even a lot of corruption,” he said, “but I can say that the prime minister would never brazenly lease his own personal car to the state for his official use, and that the people would never tolerate it.”

Impunity. And tolerance.