If Mizzi is an embarrassment... what about Juncker?

I shall have to start this article by admitting to a mistake that has dogged nearly all my published work for the past 25 years. Throughout all that time, I have always argued (pretty convincingly, if I say so myself) that ‘political hypocrisy’ is one of the very few areas where Malta stands head and shoulders above all international competition. 

If hypocrisy were an Olympic event, I remember writing once, we would win gold every time.  

Well, I now realise I was wrong. Not only would Malta fail to win gold... but we probably wouldn’t even place anywhere near the top three. I’m afraid our levels of political hypocrisy are just not up to the standard set by the rest of Europe. Once again, we have been exposed as a nation of bungling amateurs.  

Two ongoing issues illustrate this fact with graphic precision. The first concerns Germany, which – for the umpteenth time – now finds itself in breach of the Maastricht criteria (you know, the same regulations other countries get clobbered for breaking). 

The second concerns the fuss kicked up by the European Parliament over Konrad Mizzi’s secret holdings in Panama... while conveniently ignoring the fact that Commission President Jean Claude Juncker is up to his eyeballs in tax evasion and money laundering scandals of his own.

Let’s take them one by one. By an interesting coincidence, news that Germany has once again failed to observe the most basic of the eurozone’s rules – i.e., that government spending cannot exceed 3% of the country’s GDP – comes out roughly at the same time as the Commission closed excessive deficit procedures against Malta. 

I find this interesting because, ever since 2009, the pressure piled on our microscopic economy to conform to this manifestly unrealistic target was simply enormous. This is how it was reported on the European Council website:

“Malta was subject to an excessive deficit procedure from July 2009 to December 2012. The procedure was reopened in June 2013, after Malta’s deficit was estimated to have reached 3.3% of GDP in 2012. A 2.6% of GDP deficit had been projected for 2012 when the procedure was closed in December 2012. 

“In June 2013, the Council issued a recommendation calling on Malta to correct its deficit by 2014. To achieve this, it called for an improvement of the structural balance of 0.7% of GDP in 2013 and 2014. 

“Malta reduced its general government deficit to 2.6% of GDP in 2013 and 2.1% in 2014. The Commission 2015 spring forecast projects deficits of 1.8% of GDP in 2015 and 1.5% in 2016. Malta’s deficit is thus set to remain below the 3% of GDP reference value over the forecast horizon.”

You will surely note how the infringement procedures were triggered by an excessive deficit that was only 0.3% higher than the 3% limit. Yet when it came to Germany exceeding the same target by a staggering 4% – all current indications point towards a whopping 7% of GDP – what do you all think happened? How much pressure do you all think was applied on the richest and most powerful EU member state, to obey rules which other countries are made to obey at the crack of a whip? 

This excerpt from a 2012 BBC report should give you a rough idea. “There was, from the beginning, a way for the EU to police the economies of member states by following the rules that had been laid down for the single currency in the Maastricht Treaty. It was called the Stability and Growth Pact, and it was not Italy or Greece that torpedoed it – it was Germany.

“In 2003, France and Germany had both overspent, and their budget deficits had exceeded the 3% of GDP limit to which they were legally bound. The Commission – then led by the former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi – had the power to fine them. But the finance ministers of what was then the 15 eurozone member countries gathered in Brussels and voted the Commission down.

“They voted to let France and Germany off. They voted not to enforce the rules they had signed-up to and which were designed to protect the stability of the single currency.”

The same article also quotes Prodi as saying: “I tried and they [the finance ministers] told me to shut up.”

Got that, everyone? In 2003, the Commission President tried to do something about the unacceptable situation whereby one country can just flip its middle finger and do as it pleases... and they told him to shut up. 

Now, in 2017, Germany is at it again... only this time, the Commission President (no longer Prodi, but the scandal-beleaguered Jean-Claude Juncker) hasn’t bothered even trying. It is as though the EU is resigned to a situation whereby ‘the rules’ only apply to the smallest and most economically underprivileged of its 27 member states (even though, ironically, tiny Malta has so far succeeded where giant Germany has always failed. Odd, isn’t it?) 

But that, in itself, does not necessarily make the situation hypocritical. No, it is astonishing cheek with which Germany lectures the rest of the EU about fiscal morality that boggles the mind (and, quite frankly, turns the stomach). You would think that a country that abuses its wealth and power to get itself let off the hook altogether – not once or twice, but multiple times – would at least have the decency to keep its trap shut. 

But no! Germany was at the forefront of the shocking and alarming way Greece was bullied and browbeaten into submission... with the European Central Bank even shutting down the country’s banking system altogether. Germany even had the temerity to call for a new ‘Stability and Growth Pact’ – having itself defecated so abundantly on the previous three specimens – stipulating harsher penalties for countries which break the rules.

I mean, how on earth can any other country possibly compete with that for sheer two-faced hypocrisy? It looks to me like a completely unbeatable word record... 

But then, others have been known to come close. This week, for instance, I was struck by an article in which Spanish Socialist MEP Ana Gomes claimed that ‘the Konrad Mizzi situation is not only embarrassing for Malta, but also for Europe, since he chairs the Energy Council...”

This is not exactly the first time the European Parliament has gone all high and mighty on us... tut-tutting from the stratospheric heights of its moral superiority, for all the world as if ‘corruption’ and ‘maladministration’ are completely alien to other parts of the EU.

You may recall, for instance, how the EP overwhelmingly voted against Leo Brincat for the Court of Auditors, on the grounds that he had voted against a no confidence motion in Mizzi. One MEP even simpered that this was an ‘act of principle’. (Note: Brincat went on to get the job anyway, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how much these ‘principles’ are actually worth in practice... but that is another story).

There is, however, a small problem with all this strutting, posturing and moralising on the European stage. I think we all safely agree that Gomes and co. have a valid point: it is certainly embarrassing, for Malta, that the only serving minister named in the Panama Papers just happened to be Maltese

But if the ‘Konrad Mizzi situation’ is so embarrassing for Europe... what are we to make of the Jean-Claude Juncker situation?

Unlike Konrad Mizzi, Juncker was approved for the position of Commission President by the same European Parliament that harbours such unimpeachable moral principles... AFTER the Luxleaks scandal, which revealed that the former Luxembourg PM had turned his own country into a tax haven. 

And, oh look: now, the same consortium of investigative journalists that exposed Mizzi’s Panama connections last year, has also accused Juncker of abusing his position as Luxembourg’s PM to block anti-tax evasion initiatives by the EU.

Perhaps MEPs like Ana Gomes were too busy feeling ‘embarrassed’ by Konrad Mizzi to notice, but the Commission President they themselves approved by an overwhelming majority was revealed to have spent years “secretly blocking” EU efforts to tackle tax avoidance by multinational corporations. He now stands accused of having frustrated concerted EU action in order to protect his own country’s murky tax regime. 

How embarrassing is THAT for Europe? And more to the point: how much more hypocritical can you possibly get?