Matthew Caruana Galizia wrote this article on Serbian investigative journalism website Krik, warning against the tempting panacea of EU membership and the misguided idea that it could heal all wounds and fix all structural defects with relatively painless effort.
He tells his Serbian readers that Malta’s experience of EU membership has also been the giving a much greater currency to the rotten and corrupt that before used to be trapped within the limited value that Malta’s borders can give. And here he illustrates his point, by showing how EU membership gave exponential value to the streetwise nonentities Keith Schembri and Neville Gafa’:
“Our prime minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, was an insignificant bank clerk in the nineties. EU membership, and the election of his childhood friend Joseph Muscat, put him in a position where he was able to corrupt a billion-dollar deal for the purchase of gas, backed by European banks. Another friend of the prime minister, Neville Gafa, went from selling spectacles on the minimum wage to operating a multi-million euro Schengen visa sales racket from behind a government desk. Not only have they escaped prosecution: they still work for the prime minister.”