That’s what happens when you get the manager of a small island’s Coca-Cola bottling plant to run a national airline

Read this story in the Times of Malta this morning. Over the last few weeks, this website has featured photographs of the kind of planes Air Malta has been wet-leasing, and the complaints of passengers who booked a flight with Air Malta and ended up on a converted cargo plane or a tacky Ellinair aircraft with non-functioning lavatories.

That’s what you get when you rope in the manager of the island’s Coca-Cola bottling plant to run the national airline – while she’s still running the Coca-Cola bottling plant. Maria Micallef is Air Malta’s chairman, but already she’s seen off two well-respected CEOs, Louis Giordmaina (formerly of Lufthansa Technik) and Philip Micallef (formerly of the Malta Communications Authority) to plant herself on centre-stage and serve the government’s specialised interests rather than those of the airline itself.

And no doubt her own interests too, because she even sought and gained advantage for her unemployable boyfriend.

So the incoming Labour government removed Air Malta’s then CEO, Peter Davis, in 2013, after years of campaigning against him while they were in Opposition, saying he was paid too much and that a Maltese person could do it (because you know how it is, Malta is teeming with aviation industry crisis management specialists). And they installed the manager of a soft drinks bottling plant instead and are now probably wondering why the crisis downward-spiralled into a catastrophe.

The trouble with the Labour Party is that they think anybody can do any job, with no special skills required. Look at them – look at every decision they’ve taken. It’s all been based on that assumption. They give a power station contract to Maltese tinpot businessmen who run car dealerships and hotels and build flats.

They sign over Malta’s public hospital to a Canadian-Indian fraudster who couldn’t even run a guest-house without bankrupting it. They install people in public positions who have neither the skills nor the track record to qualify them for the job. It’s just horrendous.