The government lies to us about Mrs Konrad Mizzi. Yet again.
The government must think we in the news media are all dead in the water – either that, or we’re so confused by the deluge of details of their scandals that we can’t even keep track of the basics.
A couple of weeks ago, after I broke the story that Mrs Konrad Mizzi’s Malta Enterprise contract had been renewed, the government began putting about the lie that actually, they were busy looking for a replacement for her, and she was just filling in.
Why was it a lie? Well, it’s ruddy obvious, isn’t it: William Wait, who is chairman of Malta Enterprise, told me specifically that they had already been through a call for applications and had received many, BUT THEN MRS MIZZI’S CONTRACT WAS RENEWED. In other words, Malta Enterprise renewed her contract after the applications process was closed, meaning that none of the applicants were chosen and she got the job again.
There has not been another call for applications since – so it is clear that what the government did, after the fuss broke out when I reported on her contract renewal, was revisit those applications, pull one out of the hat, and give her the job.
But hang on a minute – we don’t even know whether Mrs Mizzi is leaving or if they’ve added on this other woman just to shut us up and pretend that Mrs Mizzi is off the state payroll. Because the thing is that the government has refused emphatically to answer questions as to whether Mrs Mizzi is going to be taken off the Maltese payroll altogether.
This is what Mr Wait, Malta Enterprise’s chairman, told me just three weeks ago, on 7 February: “There was a call for applications to fill the post, and we had a lot of interest. There were many applications. Then Mrs Mizzi’s contract was renewed.”
I asked him to specify whether it was renewed under the same terms and conditions, and he said that it was. “I am not sure when it was renewed exactly,” he said, “but I believe it was in the last quarter of 2016.”
The applicant who has been pulled out of their hat, Jennifer Shen May, is even less qualified for the post than Mrs Mizzi is. Mrs Mizzi appears to have connections to the Chinese authorities – at least sufficient connections to allow her to hold citizenship of another country (Malta), which China does not permit its citizens to do. And she never severed her contacts with her home country.
Mrs Shen May, who is in her 50s, has been in Malta for at least the past quarter-century. I remember she used to work as an admin clerk, when she was studying accounts, for somebody I know back in the early 1990s. She is married to a British man and they have a child who is schooled here. Over the last few years, she has worked in administrative and book-keeping/accounts jobs for small companies and an insurance agency. How that qualifies her to be an envoy for Malta Enterprise, setting up deals and contacts and networking with corporations and investors, is best left to Malta Enterprise to explain.
We are told that she speaks fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. Well, obviously – she is Chinese. That is like sending me to the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada or the United States as Malta Enterprise’s trade and investment envoy, and putting out a press release saying that it’s because I speak fluent English. In other words: a farce.
Fluency in the language is just the starting point, like having the power of speech in the first place, as distinct from being dumb. Without that you can do nothing. But it’s not what qualifies you to be a trade and investment envoy. Those skills and qualifications are something else apart.
So now we are going to be paying two of them instead of just the one: Mrs Mizzi Liang and Mrs Shen May, because the government won’t answer on whether Mrs Mizzi is being taken off the state payroll, which means that she’s staying on it.
It also means that we will be paying for Mrs Shen May’s son to go to a private school in China, for a big relocation package and all those flights between Malta and China which Mrs Mizzi had written into her contract and which Mrs Shen May will want too because Malta, not China, is her family’s home.
It doesn’t get better. It gets worse.
Jennifer Shen May with her husband and son