Transport Malta - Can it get any worse?

Today, there was a story of further corruption at Transport Malta (TM) on MaltaToday. It seems to be the same story broken by The Shift News five months ago.

"Senior Transport Malta officials are at the centre of a corruption racket in which they allegedly drop maritime fines after pocketing money from boaters • Data shows that at least 59% of maritime fines issued in 2021 were marked as ‘lost’, meaning that hundreds of thousands of euros in fines were never collected"

Yet another scandal at TM which The Shift News uncovered -The Shift revealed how new RHIBs (rigid hull inflatable boats) bought in 2021 for some €500,000 were declared unseaworthy just a year later. The RHIBs were supplied by an importer from Rabat, Transport Minister Ian Borg’s electoral district.

Yet another scandal at TM - a driving examiner told a court last year that he was warned that unless a vehicle came back “splattered in blood,” the driver, if so mandated by "the minister", must pass his test.

“Ian Borg was just doing his job. Shall I tell him to stop doing his job,” Abela asked. By doing his job he seems to mean buying votes irrelevant of the fact that he would be horrifyingly compromising road safety.

Yet another scandal at TM - the NAO report which slammed public procurement practices at TM. In Prof Kevin Cassar's words, literally a Wild West situation, with every public procurement rule brazenly broken.

Yet everything has become okay in Malta, normalised. It's business as usual.

That's the level of impunity in this country. And the majority of Maltese seem to think that this is all ok and persist in voting it in. That's complicity. That, perhaps, is the saddest part.