Little has been made public about Robert Abela’s newly elected permanent secretary of the Ministry for Finance, Paul Żahra. He replaced Alfred Camilleri who held his position since the Nationalist administrations. Paul Żahra was appointed to his new post by Prime Minister as are all other permanent secretaries.
Paul Żahra has spent a career at the Ministry for Finance and other ministries building a reputation for financial discipline, austerity, conservative planning, and a great reluctance to issue and disburse public funds. He consistently warned his technical and political superiors about the EU’s excessive deficit procedure and challenged them to keep the spending of public finances at a modest pace so as to preferably not add to Malta’s deficit.
In 2022, Paul Żahra threw away all that he believed and stood for throughout his life by accepting the position of permanent secretary of the Ministry for Finances to the most financially reckless government in our history. In fact, Paul Żahra went on to approve and sign off his first budget estimates for 2023 with an increase of €875,946,000 in recurrent revenue, alone. This is an increase of 16.4% from last year’s figure of €5,330,971,000 to this year’s €6,206,917,000 (these figures don’t include debt servicing). That’s a very impressive way how to make your debut as permanent secretary of finance.
Paul Żahra is no longer so talkative these days. Previously, he used to be very argumentative about economic principles and philosophy, nowadays he does his job like any other accountant: inputting numbers that his boss feeds him. The Ministry of Finance used to be a ministry with a strong influence on the OPM’s budgeting priorities and principles and economic policy, and it used to hold many discussions and mediations on policy according to financial issues and exigencies. Nowadays, the Ministry of Finance has become a simple accounting department for the Office of the Prime Minister. This situation is posing a serious risk of seriously exacerbating the structural issues we have with public finances. Labour has taken all the power away from technocrats and public policy has simply become the diktat of the dictator in Castille – and this is also why public finances are getting wrecked.
Yet, Paul Żahra like Clyde Caruana is very complicit in what is going on. They are the executioners and signatories to the wreckage in public finances, and even though they may disagree with it, they are its executors and abettors. Clyde Caruana after all, needs to pay his mortgage in his villa and Paul Zahra is too afraid to leave his job to go into the private industry for disagreeing with his employer – yet their attitude and character and decisions make them all the more untrustworthy, feeble and easily corruptible in moral terms.
Robert Abela has forced the government into a never-ending public spending spree that includes of course a marathon of corruption. The dysfunctional result of the government’s spending binge is most probably also intentional. Labour knows that it can’t survive in government for many years to come and it knows the end is drawing near, so they are looting everything they can from the public treasury until they leave, only to leave behind them the biggest public finances wreck in our history. They are happy to leave the country ungovernable and broke when they leave power because it is inevitable that anyone who takes over Labour will have to implement cost-cutting measures in public financing. This is how Labour politicians think because they are not ordinary politicians, but members of a criminal organisation that only works for its own interests at the expense of the whole nation.
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Historian and Publisher
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