88 million euros of public money put at risk to save Muscat’s skin

“What’s the fuss? I’m sure the Fenechs and the Gasans and SOCAR and Siemens and insolvent Gasol will pay their debts to Bank of Valletta and we won’t have to use 88 million euros of your money to pay what they owe. L-aqwa li ma nispiccawx minghajr il-power station li m’ghandniex bzonn u jien ma jkollix ghalfejn nirrizenja.”

I don’t know how the people who swallowed Labour’s rabble-rousing propaganda messages whole and repeated them ad nauseam all over social media and at real-life social gatherings can live with themselves now.

In their position, I would feel so bl**dy stupid.

When Tonio Fenech, who was then finance minister, flew out of Malta in October 2009 to watch a football match, accompanied by Joe Gasan and (the late) George Fenech, in the latter’s private jet, Joseph Muscat and his Super One bandwagon had a riot. Muscat and his Opposition turned up to parliament all wearing Arsenal scarves, when the finance minister was due to speak.

We heard about it endlessly, for days, weeks, months and were still hearing about it three years later. I realise now that the only reason Muscat and his men didn’t use it in the general election campaign too, switching to the ‘arlogg tal-lira’ instead, was because they were talking to the Gasans and the Fenechs about their secret power station project at the time.

Now, Muscat has thought nothing of committing 88 million euros of public money – money that belongs to the country – to make good for the Gasans and the Fenechs should they and their fellow shareholders SOCAR, Siemens and the technically insolvent Gasol default on the 101 million euro loan they so conveniently got from the government’s stooge bank, the Bank of Valletta, presumably because no other bank would give them one with a project that’s such a mess, so pointless, and with a shareholder that has had to be delisted from the London Stock Exchange’s alternative list because of the financial mess it’s in.

Why did Muscat do that? Because if he hadn’t told the Bank of Valletta “don’t worry, give them what they want and if they can’t pay you back, I’ll use 88 million of public money to pay their debt”, even the Bank of Valletta wouldn’t have given them the 101-million euro they needed to get the project off the ground.

And that would mean no power station for Joseph, and his credibility would go ‘Pooof!’ (as if it hasn’t already, but this was his main electoral platform; the basis for his promised resignation).

Read my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday tomorrow – this is what it’s about.

And to get back to my original point. Tonio Fenech taking a plane ride to see a football match with Joe Gasan and George Fenech was apparently a massive act of corruption which had Muscat pretending to be pole-axed with disgust while his Super One TV and radio went wild.

And now Muscat is in power and he uses your money, our money – 88 million euros of it – to guarantee their debts and those of their business partners. And that’s OK. That’s less shocking than a football match.

I would be furious now if I had taken him at face value then – furious at myself for believing him and even more furious at him for making a fool of me.

Why has he guaranteed their loan? Pretty obvious, really – they’re the ones who held all the cards. In any normal situation/democracy/outside the Third World, the government would be the one with all the leverage. But what those people have obviously done here is tell Muscat: “Either you have the government stand as guarantor so that the Bank of Valletta will give us a loan, because nobody else will, or you won’t get your power station and have egg all over your face, with all the political consequences of that and the election definitely lost in 2018.”

And Muscat obliged, because nothing is too expensive when it comes to saving his own political skin, when he doesn’t have to pay for it himself.