UPDATED/Joe Cassar resigns from shadow cabinet

UPDATE: In a statement this afternoon, Joe Cassar said that he “categorically refutes” that he has “ever known or consented to any payments being made on his behalf by Mr Gaffarena” for work on his property.

Joe Cassar, the psychiatrist who was Health Minister for a time, has resigned from the shadow cabinet, with the Opposition leader saying that it is quite clear that he cannot stay on in his position as Opposition spokesman for culture.

This was after newspaper revelations today that the bill for 8,000 euros of work carried out by the construction company Devlands on his home a few years ago when he was a cabinet minister was paid by Joe Gaffarena, who gave Devlands payment in kind in the form of petrol and diesel from his then-illegal JGaff petrol station.

It turns out that Gaffarena also installed and paid for CCTV cameras for the same house. Earlier, it was revealed that Cassar bought a car for a thousand euros from this same Joe Gaffarena, who would not accept payment but told him to donate the money to the Nationalist Party instead.

Cassar says that he did nothing that breaches the law, but that is hardly the point. Quite apart from the fact that our laws are seriously inadequate in this regard, this is not about breaking the law. This reduction of the difference between wrong and right to what is legal and what is not is typical of Malta, and responsible for many of the problems we are currently dealing with. Cassar himself has ended up succumbing to this all-pervasive normalisation of a situation in which there are no boundaries. Boundaries are so little understood (let alone respected) in Malta that even relationships between politicians, political officials and businessmen are taken for granted as entirely normal and acceptable. But they are not.

Over the years, I have got the distinct impression that politicians and those involved in politics, instead of keeping their distance from business operators and similar, instead see their position as a wonderful opportunity to get right in there socially, spending extended lengths of time at the homes of such people, days out on their boats, cosy evenings on their living-room sofas and summer afternoons round their swimming-pools.

I could see why the business operators would extend so much hospitality to politicians and political operators, of course – and I never for one moment imagined it was for the sheer love of their scintillating company – but I could never understand why the politicians and the political operators accepted that hospitality. Were they so desperate for treats and a social life, and so fascinated by the trappings of a well-to-do way of life? Or did they just think that these people were their friends?

If politicians stick to the golden rule – never let anyone pay for anything for you, and adopt the same approach to your social life that a conservative judge would – then political life in Malta would be so much more transparent than it is. But instead we are left with the feeling that many Maltese politicians on both sides of the house enjoy their position precisely because they get so much of what the prime minister’s wife, Mrs Muscat, so succinctly described as “more treatment”.

When Joe Cassar wanted a car for his wife or daughter – the car was registered in his wife’s name, but she does not need her husband to buy her a car because she has a thriving practice in child psychology – he should have gone to a proper dealer and paid for it in a straightforward transaction. In other words, not the sort of dealer who would say “You don’t owe me anything”. And when Joe Gaffarena told him “Give the money to the Nationalist Party instead”, Cassar should have written out the cheque to Gaffarena all the same and told him “Here’s the money. If you want to donate it to the party, you can do so yourself.”

As for the construction work on the his house, let’s start off from the fact that contracting a major construction company like Devlands – which isn’t really in the house restoration/reconstruction business anyway – is already a problem because those are the companies that tender for big construction jobs for the government. If 90% of the civilian population have their houses built and reconstructed by small operators or Jack the Builder who doesn’t tender for government business, ministers of all people should do the same.

The worst part of it is not that Joe Gaffarena paid Devlands’ bill for work on the then cabinet minister’s house, but that he paid the bill using fuel from an illegal petrol station for which he was fighting the government – of which Joe Cassar formed part – for a permit.

He didn’t get the permit, but boy, did he humiliate and undermine the government by using fuel from that fuel station to pay a minister’s building bill.

And the real tragedy here is that an otherwise sound man – when I knew him, Joe Cassar was basically decent and it was his desire for better politics that drove him to stand for election when he had a demanding career already as a psychiatrist – has gone down over his poor judgement in letting a corrupt man like Gaffarena pay his 8,000-euro builders’ bill (and using fuel from an illegal station) when there is so much rampant corruption going on right now and they’re all getting away with it because it is framed in the context of legality: like a Malta Enterprise salary for an elusive minister’s wife doing an invisible job in an office that exists one day and doesn’t the next.