Father confessor

The Maltese commissioner is no stranger to controversy.

The scene is a densely packed counting hall, just as the results of an election are being read out. “Lawrence Gonzi – 508 votes.” The hall erupts into a tumult of Mediterranean festivity, energised as much by Schadenfreude as joy at Gonzi’s victory.

Standing in the thick of it is a small-framed man who seems oblivious to the mayhem. Occasionally, he shakes someone’s hand or half-turns to acknowledge a pat on the back; but, when not swaying to avoid the crowds, he reverts to fiddling intently with his mobile phone. In an advert, he might have been too absorbed by some technological wizardry to care what was happening. But on that night, in February 2004, the man – John Dalli – had just placed a very distant second in the contest to lead Malta’s centre-right Nationalist Party.

To an outsider, his behaviour might appear ungracious – betraying, perhaps, the pique for which his native Qormi is famous – but it also bespeaks a trait for which Dalli is respected among friends and enemies alike: a reluctance to dissemble, whatever his immediate political interests.

With hindsight, Dalli had perhaps already intimated the consequences of his challenge. Gonzi’s ascent had been considered all but a formality, as he had been endorsed by Eddie Fenech Adami, dubbed the ‘father of European Malta’ and a man who had bent the Nationalist Party to his will since 1977.

By threatening to rewrite the approved script in a bid to seize a once-in-a lifetime opportunity, Dalli had not only demonstrated another of his traits – a reluctance to do the expected – but also, in the eyes of many Nationalists, he had done the unthinkable. From the moment he submitted his candidature, Dalli’s canvassers spoke of a wave of subtle hostility from the party’s headquarters, which – as Dalli himself recently claimed – continued until this year and his hearing in the European Parliament as European commissioner-designate for health and consumer policy.

Five months after his defeat, Dalli submitted a letter of resignation from the Gonzi cabinet that still makes for a bitter read: “In the 17 years I have served under all Nationalist governments…I have been under constant attack and the target of the Labour Party. But this is the first time I am facing attacks from different quarters.” Dalli did not disguise his suspicions that those ‘quarters’ lay within his own party.

The ammunition had been provided by two allegations of nepotism. The first involved airline tickets allegedly channelled to his daughter’s firm. The second, relating to a tender for hospital equipment, supposedly involving kickbacks to his brother Sebastian (who is now facing unrelated criminal charges over a consignment of ‘soap’ illegally imported from Libya).

Previous allegations had not been proven; some may even have strengthened him politically. In the 1990s, for instance, the Labour Party accused Dalli of selling a national bank to HSBC “secretively” and “single-handedly” – two traits generally viewed favourably by Malta’s business community.

Fact File

Curriculum Vitae

1948: Born, Qormi
1964: Apprentice, Malta dockyards
1970: Degree in accounting, Malta College for Arts, Science and Technology
1972-77: Financial controller, Blue Bell Malta
1977-79: Set up Blue Bell Malta office in Brussels
1981-86: Management consultant
1987: Elected to parliament
1987-96 &1998-2004: Chairman, Libyan-Maltese Joint Commission
1987-90: Junior minister for industry
1009-92: Minister for economic services
1998-2004: Minister of finance and economy
2004: Minister for foreign affairs and investment promotion
2007-10: Minister for social policy, health and care for the elderly
2010-: European commissioner for health and consumer policy

On previous occasions, the Nationalists had closed ranks behind Dalli. But not this time. Stung by Gonzi’s declaration that he “couldn’t have a cabinet minister under investigation” – uttered, tellingly, before any investigation had been launched – Dalli entered Maltese history as only the third minister to resign since independence in 1964.

Dalli’s career seemed to have ended where it began: in oblivion.

To glimpse where Dalli’s career started is difficult, in part because he is not much given to airing his family history, but also because so much of the Malta of his childhood has vanished. His father ran a small coffee shop in a depressed suburb of Valletta’s Grand Harbour, serving a long-since departed clientele of mainly British servicemen; and his other brother, Father George Dalli – a controversial figure in his own right – recently described their upbringing in Dickensian terms: “We were a poor family. Poverty back then simply meant asking your mother for another piece of bread which she didn’t have.” The boys would earn shillings where they could, he said. “It was a life of drudgery, but, then again, one of happiness as well.”

Opportunities were limited and, like many of his peers, Dalli enrolled as an apprentice at the Royal Malta Dockyard, which sponsored his accountancy degree. At 24, he became a financial controller at Blue Bell Malta, which handled some 25% of Malta’s exports. At 30, he set up its head office in Brussels.

He returned to head the Nationalists’ campaign team ahead of the 1981 election, at a time when Malta’s typically confrontational style of politics had reached fever-pitch. As an accountant, he was something of a misfit within what was widely regarded ‘a party of lawyers’, but Fenech Adami relied on Dalli to formulate the party’s economy policies. Years later, it was Dalli who negotiated the economic chapter of Malta’s accession talks with the EU and restructured its economy ahead of accession in 2004.

Assessments of his performance vary wildly. Admirers credit Dalli with dragging Malta out of the economic Dark Ages after two decades of strict protectionism; critics accuse him of crippling the country with debt. Insiders gossip about his links to Libya, suggesting his diplomacy, as chairman of the Libyan-Maltese Joint Commission, went beyond the call of duty. In this he was aided, if not by fluency in Arabic (like most Maltese, he is able to communicate in Arabic, but is more comfortable with Italian), then by affinity. On another level, some of his policy decisions made him the man everybody loved to hate: he introduced VAT, capital-gains tax and fiscal cash registers, for which he was nicknamed ‘Johnny Cash’.

All assessments, though, convey a sense of Dalli as part of the furniture at the seat of government, the Auberge de Castile. And for this reason alone, his otherwise spectacular comeback in 2007 was no particular surprise.

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As Malta lumbered towards elections in March 2008, the auditor-general and police commissioner exonerated Dalli of the accusations of nepotism. Perhaps more important to his comeback, factions had emerged within the Nationalist Party. With typical frankness, Dalli later revealed that many of the malcontents had turned to him: “I act as a father confessor to most of them…These are good people who need to be fostered, and not hit on the head.”

In November 2007, Gonzi brought back Dalli, first as his personal adviser and, later, as minister for social policy. The ‘backbencher revolt’ appeared to worsen immediately, only to subside after Dalli’s nomination to the European Commission. Was this just coincidence, the media wondered? Gonzi was forced to issue a curt rebuttal that Dalli’s nomination “was not a case of the government wanting to oust” Dalli. Perhaps that is just as well, since history suggests Dalli has a habit of bouncing back.