Cue the canned laughter

In his New Year message, the Prime Minister has promised to clamp down on “webs of corruption that have been growing for years”. Are we supposed to laugh at this transparent attempt at deviating attention from the fact that most corruption scandals over the last three years have been triggered directly by the change in government?

And the biggest stink of corruption comes not from tangled webs of civil servants taking backhanders from operators, as the Prime Minister implies here, but from the major government decisions of the last three years, starting with the power station deal, continuing with the privatisation tender for state hospitals, and drifting around several smaller but telling decisions in between, like the appointment of around 500 cronies to positions of trust, the wheeling and dealing with the Gaffarenas, and the Café Premier deal, which I now suspect was struck not to benefit Mario Camilleri but to benefit Banif Bank directly before a significant part of its shareholding was due to be sold. The bank was owed €2,560,800 by Café Premier and Joseph Muscat’s government made good for that debt, allowing the bank to improve its bottom line with a decrease of €2.57 million in its bad debts provision.