A skyscraper built on sand: Malta is under scrutiny as a corrupt society

The days of living in an island bubble are long, long gone. People elsewhere – investors, including the much-hoped-for post-Brexit investors and governments of other states – are watching the way we are handling this unfolding crisis.

They have been watching since February and March last year, when we first found out that the Energy and Health Minister, who is the cabinet minister responsible for signing all major government contracts, has a company in Panama along with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. And that there is a third company intimately linked with them.

Since then there has been widespread bewilderment at how there have been no resignations, and more so how the population tolerates it. The words I hear most often are: “How is it possible that they are still there? Why do people allow it?”

And I can’t explain Maltese culture: that it is a culture of putting up with a “ħakem”, trying to curry favour with that ħakem to gain special privileges, avoiding the ħakem’s anger to survive, and being thankful that the ħakem is benign (read – not actually imprisoning you without charges or executing you in the public square).

It is not a democratic place. There is no democratic spirit. People think only in terms of surviving and keeping the ħakem off their backs. This is not European thinking, unless we’re looking at Europe 400 years ago. And we’re in the 21st century.

What astounds those who live in European democracies most right now is the way the Prime Minister and his henchmen have, with the unthinking acquiescence of the public and even the institutions themselves, turned this shocking crisis into a matter of “proof” and “inquiries” and “evidence” and “courts of law”.

Of course they are astonished to see Maltese people forget or ignore the one fundamental ethical baseline: the Prime Minister, like Caesar’s wife, must be above even mere suspicion.

This basic principle is not a case of majority rule, or popular support. It is a baseline. People on the outside, looking in, have been able to see over the past year that Malta does not have that baseline.

People in Malta are now allowing their head of government and his cronies to justify themselves in terms of what is legal and what is illegal, what is true and what is untrue. The fact of the matter is that when you have brought your country and government into disrepute through your actions – whether those actions are illegal or legal, whether it is through action or inaction – it is time to go.

When you are at the centre of a storm of a scandal, frozen in the headlights, concentrating on fighting your public battles and trying to survive another day while administering your secret offshore set-ups behind everybody’s back, it’s time to go.

That the Prime Minister and his gang will not go of their own accord has been taken note of by those who are watching, and that is bad enough. If the electorate now votes to return these criminals to power, Malta will be completely written off, and we will only have ourselves to blame for believing that a solid economy can be the fruit of widespread corruption, money-laundering and other forms of grave abuse.

We have moved from a good house built on rock-solid foundations to a skyscraper built on sand, and the consequences are now inevitable.