Opinion: Robber barons

America’s late 19th century was dominated by ultra-rich capitalists who exploited their close relationship with politicians to amass unprecedented personal wealth.

Through political corruption, they were allowed to exploit enslaved workers, run competitors out of business, make tonnes of money and live like royalty.

This was America’s Gilded Age, where income inequality reached unprecedented levels. While America’s robber barons enjoyed unparalleled luxury, the workers who generated their wealth barely scraped a living.

You may be surprised by how much they have in common with Labour’s friends and donors of today.

A recent KPMG survey revealed that since Robert Abela came to power in 2020, the gap between top earners and those living from pay cheque to pay cheque has rocketed.  While income inequality in the rest of Europe has steadily fallen since 2019, Abela’s Malta bucked the trend.

Malta witnessed a dramatic rise in the gap between rich and poor.  In Abela’s socialist Malta, the richest are getting richer, and the poorest are getting poorer. In just four years, income inequality has risen by an unprecedented 18%.

If it weren’t for welfare benefits funded by Labour’s massive borrowing spree, that gap would have increased by a staggering 57%.

When Abela brags the economy is growing, keep that in mind.  The additional wealth generated in Malta is increasingly diverted not to those who need it most but to Labour’s wealthy friends. Over 88,000 people in Malta live below the poverty line.

Under Abela, Malta entered its own Gilded Age – an era characterised by collusion between Labour’s highest officials and rabidly greedy collaborators to enable industrial-scale looting of the country’s wealth – financial, land, health facilities, energy production, clean sea and air – producing an ever-widening gap in income masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

Abela has built upon Muscat’s legacy – a politics consumed by the shameless diversion of public funds to wealthy businessmen, construction magnates, and rotten opportunists. Hundreds of millions of euro were funneled to those friends, press reports confirm.

Take Abela himself. He’s partnered in business with Gilbert Bonnici, one of the directors at Bonnici Brothers. Their line of business is construction. Yet they were awarded a €600 million contract to develop a waste-to-energy plant despite their evident lack of expertise in the field.

The court has now annulled that contract.  It found that the evaluation committee was irregular. It nullified all the decisions taken by the adjudication committee and the revisions boards.  The whole process will have to start from scratch with a new adjudication board.

Some of the temporary generators being used to defuse the public’s rage over the repeated power cuts are leased from Bonnici Brothers.

Abela told the nation that we don’t have an energy production problem, only a distribution issue. Yet Bonnici Brothers was awarded another €37 million contract to deliver a temporary diesel-powered power plant.

That plant should have been up and running by May. But Bonnici Brothers didn’t have an energy plant. They knew nothing about generating energy, so they subcontracted a Saudi Arabian company, Altaaqa Alternative Solutions Global FZE, to provide that plant. That power station only reached Malta on 27 July.

Enemalta CEO Ryan Fava promised it would be up and running in mid-August.  That’s highly unlikely, since the contract stipulates the plant needs 13 weeks to become operational. Enemalta has now shifted the deadline again to the end of August. But don’t bet on it.

Bonnici Brothers should have been fined €1,000 per day for failing to meet the delivery target. But they haven’t. All we get from Enemalta are excuses to protect Robert Abela’s friends while our money is poured down the drain.

That’s only one example.  Joseph Portelli, who dined with Robert Abela on the eve of the general elections has been taking up land and building swimming pools in ODZ areas.

Against the recommendation of the case officer, Portelli was given a permit to build swimming pools on 700 square metres of ODZ land – a permit issued during the electoral campaign while Portelli was busy raising funds for Labour from his construction colleagues.

The court annulled that permit in March after an appeal by Moviment Graffitti and Qala’s local council. The court found that Portelli’s pools were approved in violation of all the existing policies. However, no action was taken to demolish those pools and restore the ODZ land to its former state.

And now Joseph Portelli has the brass neck to apply to sanction those giant illegal pools. You can bet they’ll be sanctioned in no time at all.

Bonnici Brothers and Joseph Portelli are no exception.  There are plenty of others who’ve got their Labour political friends to give them public land for peanuts, permits to occupy pavements and to close both eyes to their infringement of regulations.

Labour even gave away our hospitals to a man claiming to be Joseph Muscat’s consultant, Shaukat Ali, and hundreds of millions of our money to Labour’s other friends.

Labour’s new generation of robber barons have accumulated not only unprecedented wealth but uncontrollable power.  They are paying off Labour to let them loot the country – from our hospitals to our power station, our land, our pavements, our shores.

Meanwhile they keep pumping millions of the money they’ve stolen from us to the party that’s helped them steal it. That money goes to run Labour’s lavish campaigns and to pay for the luxury gifts: Petrus wines, Bulgari watches, lavish holidays in the French Alps, business class travel tickets to Dubai, exclusive holidays in Tuscany or district offices in Luqa and Siġġiewi.

We need to protect our democracy and stop voter fraud. The Siggiewi social housing scandal and the rapidly unfolding Identita ID card racket are the tip of the iceberg.

We must fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than just for Labour’s wealthy friends.