“Like a soap bubble that has been exposed to the sun, so too all the PL spin in this regard has burst”
There’s a good leading article in The Malta Independent, on the subject of the current Public Accounts Committee hearings. Read it in the link below.
Sadly, the spin continues to work with the duller-minded and with those who don’t bother analysing the news. The government member of the Public Accounts Committee, the highly intelligent and intellectually razor-sharp Luciano Busuttil, has had it all go even over HIS head.
His contribution so far has been to post one photograph on his Facebook page, the one photograph in which he is not fidgeting with his smart-phone, and bask in the admiring comments beneath: “Proset Luciano”; “Good work hi”; “Min jaf kemm se jispiccaw hemm gew nies minhabba dak li ghamlu” and so on. I paraphrase, but you get the gist.
Tragic.
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http://www.independent.com.mt/mobile/2013-08-28/leader/pac-the-deconstruction-of-a-spin-2440527873/
Excellent leader.
So basically, the only real issue raised by the NAO is that minutes were not kept by the Oil Procurement Committee.
Where does the Minister come into this?
Is the NAO suggesting that Austin Gatt should have acted as Secretary of the Oil Procurement Committee, keeping and filing the minutes?
That’s exactly it, Gatt’s accused of interference and keeping himself out of its workings conjunctively.
Issuing a memo outlining cabinet’s directives on protocol to follow is, shock horror, ‘ministerial interference’.
This one’s even better than Richard Cachia Caruana’s grilling by Vella and Luciano, where advice and reporting to the prime minister became ‘instructions’.
Or JPO’s insistence on calling Gordon Pisani to appear on his behalf before the party executive.
I see that scientists have succeeded in growing mini human brains. I understand the stem cells were contibuted by the MLP.
The NAO is refusing to publish the names of the authors.
Given the stuff that certain NAO emplyees post on Facebook and the political FB groups they join, I think it is imperative that the NAO discloses the names of teh authors to see whether these people were truly independent.
They call for transparency, but they are themselves not transparent. Surely the PAC has the right to request the names of those authors, and to call them in front of it one by one. As far as I know, the NAO is accountable to Parliament, not above it.
I am eagerly awaiting Konrad Mizzi’s grilling when his turn comes up.