Just follow the money – all the way to an explanation why Labour and John Dalli are hawking a power station while Malta Today has turned Labour

An EU Commissioner, hawking a power station to an EU member state after being in the pay of the seller.

This is my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, today.

The dots have been joined up and we know now what we hadn’t noticed four years ago, when he gave an interview to The Sunday Times in that capacity: that John Dalli was in Sargas’s pay as their adviser.

And now we can say with even more conviction: “Thank God he didn’t become Nationalist leader and prime minister.”

If John Dalli thinks nothing of breaking the rules in the EU Commission’s book by conducting private business and negotiating sales to governments as the advisor to a technology company, then he would have thought nothing of, in his role as prime minister, buying for Malta a power station built and operated by a company that has or had him on board as a consultant.

He can scream, shout, roll around on the floor, turn red in the face and even write to the Columnists Police to complain that he is put upon, but these are serious matters and the questions raised about them are more serious still.

When John Dalli was a Maltese cabinet minister, he thought it perfectly all right to build up an extensive network of personal business contacts in Libya, Malta and elsewhere, using them for his consultancy firm.

He even used this Libyan network as his unique selling point, promoting it on his John Dalli & Associates website and advertising himself as the man to go to for Libyan contacts, before the whole thing blew up in his face last February.

John Dalli even had a criminal brother running around in Libya striking deals and shipping marijuana resin to Malta. We joke about that shipment because it turned out to be green soap, but we have no way of knowing how many real marijuana shipments he might have got away with before the police swooped on his vessel, the Jolly Roger.

So fine, John Dalli isn’t his brother’s keeper, but what must it have looked like when Libyan officials and others had to deal with Bastjan Dalli knowing that he is the Maltese minister’s brother? Bastjan felt so comfortable in Libya that when the police sought to arrest him after the ‘green soap’ cargo was intercepted, he fled there.

The Gaddafi authorities must have thought that our set-up here in Malta was something like theirs. Nobody in Libya would have touched Bastjan Dalli because he is John Dalli’s brother. We know that was the way things worked there.

A man with that kind of brass neck and inability to draw the line between public office and private business – or who thinks that drawing the line means leaving ‘John Dalli & Associates’ in the hands of his daughters while proceeding as normal – should never have been made EU Commissioner.

Just as Sargas plans to do with its power station carbon dioxide, shipping it to Denmark and burying it there, we exported our pollution problem to Brussels and now it’s breaking out of its tomb.

John Dalli knows he gave an interview four years ago in his role as adviser to Sargas, and that this put it on public record. So not only is he so unethical – I will not use the word ‘corrupt’ at this stage, before questions are asked (and answered) about monies he or his firm have received from Sargas for services rendered – as to carry on pushing for Malta to buy this technology, indifferent to the fact that he had become an EU Commissioner in the interim.

He must actually think that it does not matter, that he is perfectly free to act as a broker between Sargas and the Malta government, even though he is an EU Commissioner. Otherwise he would not be so blatant about it.

Let’s be frank here: even as a former cabinet minister, especially one who still had a seat in parliament, he should not have been trying to broker deals between the government and a technology company. Whichever way you slice it, it looks really bad.

The way I see it is that even if the technology is the best in the world, you can’t buy it if a former cabinet minister is paid to sell it and will probably get a cut running into millions.

There would be legitimate questions in the public mind and these situations must be beyond suspicion. Imagine what the Opposition would say, and rightly so.

The less-than-splendid irony is that the Opposition, which tied itself up into knots of affected anger about the commission paid to the man who brokered the sale of the current power station project, is helping John Dalli to broker this one and has as good as given its word that when Joseph Muscat is elected, the deal will be done.

So now we know that John Dalli has another, far more important, reason to work for the defeat of the Nationalist Party at the next general election. It is not just nine-year-old lingering bitterness at having been outplayed by his rival, but what we now suspect is the lure of a percentage commission on a contract worth hundreds of millions.

It occurs to me that a deal might very well have been struck already. When you marshal all the available facts and information, the question arises as to whether John Dalli has struck a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ bargain with the Labour Party: he helps them defeat Lawrence Gonzi, while they buy the power station he’s selling.

It might seem like a crazy, desperate and corrupt agreement but consider the stakes involved. The Labour Party can’t afford to lose another election, and John Dalli must have a hell of a lot riding on the sale or he wouldn’t be pushing so hard, debasing himself on Super One to talk about it and acting like a used-car salesman.

The long and the short of it is that he has been behaving like somebody with a vested interest in the sale of this technology because, well, he has a vested interest. Or at least he did in 2007 and we have no reason to suppose that things have changed since, judging by his antics and his persistent obsession.

“Follow the money,” I told a friend who wondered out loud why Dalli is so keen to have Malta buy this power station, as we watched him compromise and embarrass himself on Joe Grima’s Super One show.

And now I could slap myself because in his incredible stupidity, Anglu Farrugia gave the game away on Bondi+, but I was so busy laughing at his ‘tucks fors’ and his ‘semplici, cara daqs il-kristall’ that I failed to log the significance of his answer to Bondi’s question about Labour’s plan for water and electricity rates.

“Il-pjan ta’ John Dalli,” he slipped out, and when pressed further by a startled Bondi, he fudged and fumbled and beat a retreat. Instead of raising our antennae, we laughed some more because we thought what a bunch of idiots they are with John Dalli’s pie-in-the-sky esoteric plans.

But it isn’t pie-in-the-sky, is it? It’s real, and that fool Farrugia unwittingly let the cat out of the bag, only to have us not notice.

If this is the case, then they’re not just idiots, but it’s even scarier than that. They’re mind-bogglingly corrupt.

Here at last we might have the explanation why Malta Today metamorphosed overnight into the English-language newspaper the Labour Party always wanted but never had.

We could never work out why a newspaper which prided itself on independent insight suddenly began wielding a violent and madly biased axe against the government, the Nationalist Party and its leader while leaving Labour and its leader completely free of scrutiny.

We have a major scandal on our hands, and the scandal will be greater still if we proceed as normal on the understanding that we expect no better of the likes of Labour , Malta Today and John Dalli.

How good it is to be able to put all of Dalli’s sickening posturing as the ‘father confessor’ of trouble-making government backbenchers like Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Jesmond Mugliett in its proper perspective.

I trust that when they helped him make trouble for Lawrence Gonzi, they were unaware that he stands to profit from Gonzi’s defeat and the election of Joseph Muscat, who will buy ‘his’ power station.

Bring on the general election. I can’t wait to help vote Labour out – again. Even if my vote is lost in a sea of enthusiasm for Joseph and for John Dalli’s power station, then at least my conscience will be clear.

I’ll have no truck with that scum.