Baku Kon: Health & Energy Minister goes AWOL

There was a bit of a to-do in parliament last night when Chris Fearne, the PS for health, was obliged to stand in for his boss, Baku Kon, the Health & Energy Minister, when he went unaccountably AWOL.

Challenged about his boss’s failure to appear in parliament, Fearne couldn’t give an explanation. Instead, he read out the answers to PQs that had been put to his boss some time before by Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi.

Azzopardi had demanded to know of the Health & Energy Minister details of his visits to Azerbaijan since March 2013, and who went with him.

Here is the information Fearne gave parliament.

1. His boss travelled to Azerbaijan three times in 2014 – in March and September, when he was accompanied only by his “personal secretary”, and then again in December, when he was with the prime minister. This was the trip which gave us those famous photographs of the bewildered-looking Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, Kurt Farrugia and Keith Schembri confronted by a battery of dictatorship grey-heads.

2. His boss did not go to Azerbaijan in 2013 or this year.

The Opposition leader then demanded to know why the Health & Energy Minister was not in parliament, and why the electorate had not been told of his trips to Baku (apart from the one in which he accompanied the prime minister, where we got all our news and photographs from Azerbaijan’s state news agency).

The Labour whip (Godfrey Farrugia), who is the correct and proper person to answer this question as it is the party whip whose job it is to make sure that MPs turn up to parliament, said he could not explain Baku Kon’s absence.

Opposition MP Beppe Fenech Adami then commented on mike that first the minister’s wife went missing, and now the minister himself has gone missing too.

When calm was restored on the government benches, the Opposition leader leader asked why the Health & Energy Minister was not accompanied on his Baku trips by an ambassador, senior civil servant, consultant or journalists.

The Minister’s PS, Chris Fearne, took a leaf out of the Tu Quoque Book of Retorts used by the prime minister and fishwives everywhere, and said: “And why didn’t you inform the public about your upcoming trip to China? You have double standards.”

The Opposition leader responded that the taxpayer will not be paying for his visit to China, unlike the trips Baku Kon took.

Opposition MP Marthese Portelli then asked Fearne – who as PS for Health has now found himself answering questions about Energy because his boss is busy elsewhere – whether SOCAR officials are in Malta, and if so, why.

Fearne refused to reply, telling Portelli to put her question formally in writing.

Chaos then broke out, with shouting, insults and banging from the government benches.

However, I can confirm that two SOCAR officials are in Malta right now, and that they arrived on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul yesterday – see my post immediately before this one.