It is completely irrelevant that Mario Camilleri gave a thousand euros to the Nationalist Party
Mario George Camilleri
The man who bailed him out with 4.2 million euros of public money and even gave him 5% commission on top of that.
Donations are not wrong in themselves. That’s how political parties all over the democratic world survive: by virtue of donations.
Donations are only wrong and relevant when they are used as a means of influence, bribery or gaining advantage, rather than as a way of helping a political group whose ideals you approve of.
That is why donations to political parties, over a certain amount, are published in many democratic countries. That is for the sake of transparency, so that the public and the authorities can make any link there is to be made between donations and influence.
That Mario Camilleri gave – he says in a front-page interview in Times of Malta today – a thousand euros to the Nationalist Party and another thousand to Francis Zammit Dimech for his campaign is completely irrelevant. The Nationalist Party was set to lose the general election and was never going to be in a position to bail him out.
Not only that, but it didn’t want to bail him out. He himself says he tried the same deal with the previous government and got nowhere.
And the very idea that the Nationalist government would bail out this sleazy operator with 4.2 million euros of public money in exchange for the grand sum of a thousand euros in the party coffers is beyond ridiculous.
It is a grave insult.
It shows what sort of man Mario Camilleri is.
He protests now that he has been made to look like some kind of criminal. Not really. He has been made to look like the sleazeball operator and fixer that he is. Crime doesn’t come into it, unless we know for a fact that money changed hands and that the quarter-million commission wasn’t kicked back to somebody else on the government’s decision-making side.
But we’re focusing on the wrong person. You can’t blame an operator like Mario George Camilleri for trying to screw the government and the public purse for all he can so as to save his skin. Well, you can – but that is hardly the point here. The person we should be blaming and focusing on is the one who actually did help him screw over the government and suck 4.2 million euros (plus 5% commission) out of the public purse: the prime minister.
He didn’t have to. But he did. “You lookin’ at me?” Yes, Mr Prime Minister, we most certainly are.