Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/881840
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2017 24 Opinion A small detail in an article this week caught my eye. The story itself was about Adrian Delia's decision to claim a salary for his role as leader of the Nationalist Party: and I could almost stop there, because something already feels deeply amiss. Adrian Delia has been called many names in recent weeks; but whatever you or I make of him in his new political role... he is ultimately just another ordinary citizen of this country. And last I looked, this country adhered to the basic labour model prevalent all over Europe, and pretty much every where else in the developed (and even undeveloped) world: you do a job, you get paid for it. So since when is the fact that someone – anyone – aspires to receive a salary just for working, considered newsworthy enough to even print? How did we reach a stage when one of the most basic and widely understood tenets of global economics seems to actually surprise us? Well, I suppose you don't really need me to answer that. What made this story so eminently newsworthy was the fact that the political party Delia now works for – and hopes to claim his salary from ¬– is approximately 25 million euros in the red. And we were given a tentative breakdown of that extraordinary debt, too. This is a small excerpt: "The party and its media arm have to raise thousands every day to finance their debts. The repayment programme in fact has to cover several outstanding debts with various banks: €3 million payable to Bank of Valletta, €7 million to HSBC, €1 million to APS Bank, the €4 million that was collected through the PN's 'cedoli ' loans scheme – which capital was used to repay other loans and reduce interest rates on outstanding loans; but also another €6.5 million in outstanding national insurance contributions, €2 million in pending utility bills to ARMS, and other creditors." There are multiple ironies staring out at us from that paragraph: probably too many to fit into a single article. But I'll start with the most obvious one, just to get it out of the way. One of the main objections to Adrian Delia as PN leader was the fact that he comes to the role saddled with an estimated eight million euros in personal and company debts. There was speculation that HSBC would be foreclosing on a seven million euro debt incurred to finance a development project in Mgarr: questions were asked about how local banks could extend personal credit to someone who has (apparently) no savings or visible means to ever pay it back, etc. This gave rise to claims that he had entered politics in the first place just to plunder the PN. "Because the PN has so much to plunder," Delia scornfully retorted. The question therefore becomes inescapable. If Adrian Delia is deemed unsuitable as PN leader on account of his personal and professional debts... then why isn't the same argument made about the PN as a whole? How do we all accept that a political party can be eligible for political engagement, when it is equally crippled by unpayable debt... and then kick up such a godawful fuss when a single individual decides to do the same thing? At this point, the issue of Delia adding to the financial burden through a personal salary becomes purely academic. The real issue concerns how the PN can continue to exist at all... when, if it were anything but a political party, it would have been stripped to its bare bones by creditors years ago. This forces us to turn our attention to the creditors. I've already started with the banks, so I may as well continue. The real purpose of the cedoli scheme was (as indicated above) not so much to actually pay off debts, as to secure lower interest rates on existing debts with all three of Malta's major banks. I don't deny that makes a certain financial sense: to anyone who owes money, anything that can result in lower monthly instalments is generally viewed as a good thing. But it was also a one-off scheme, and as such doesn't even begin to address the underlying problem. Indeed it adds to them: those 4 million euros will have to repaid at 4% interest in 10 years' time. Meanwhile the PN has no permanent, reliable source of revenue: on the contrary, its so-called 'commercial arm' – mostly comprising a technically bankrupt media empire – is actually a money-guzzling black hole. All that's left (short Some debts are more equal than others Raphael Vassallo The real issue concerns how the PN can continue to exist at all... when, if it were anything but a political party, it would have been stripped to its bare bones