Cutajar Still Cashes In: Abela's First Call Was Wrong

Three days. That is how long Robert Abela waited after being sworn in as Prime Minister before handing Lawrence Cutajar a government consultancy. Three days — not long enough to unpack an office, apparently, but sufficient time to remember who your friends are.

Kevin Cassar's piece in the Times of Malta lays this out without embellishment, and it doesn't need any. Cutajar, the former Police Commissioner who presided over an institution that critics — and a public inquiry — found had failed to properly investigate the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, was rewarded not with accountability but with a contract. The sequence is the story. Abela's defenders will argue this was routine, that consultancies flow like water in Maltese public administration. They are right, and that is precisely the indictment.

This island has a habit of building monuments to its own tolerance. We absorb scandal, metabolise it, and six months later the man at the centre of it is drawing a government salary under a different title. The Yorgen Fenech acquittal — still raw, still reverberating in the letters pages and opinion columns of every paper in Malta this weekend — is not an isolated judicial event. It is the product of the same ecosystem that made Cutajar's consultancy possible: a system so thoroughly arranged around loyalty and proximity that accountability arrives, when it arrives at all, as a stranger who got the wrong address.

Mark Sciberras writes in the Times that the problem is bigger than one verdict, that it is the country we have allowed to emerge. He is correct, and I would add only this: we did not allow it to emerge through indifference. We watched it emerge through a thousand small decisions, each defensible in isolation, each catastrophic in aggregate. Cutajar's contract is one of those decisions. It was not scandalous enough to bring down a government. It was not minor enough to be forgotten. It is, instead, exactly the texture of how things work here — and why they keep working this way.

Joseph Muscat's response to the Fenech acquittal, dissected in the Times editorial, was characteristically precise in its misdirection: cast your critics as elitists, make the story about tone rather than substance, and wait for the news cycle to move on. It usually does. The editorial calls it a dog whistle. I would call it a survival technique refined over a decade in power and apparently still operational from outside it.

What connects Cutajar's contract, Muscat's media strategy, and the Fenech verdict is not conspiracy — it is culture. A culture in which the line between the state and its beneficiaries has been drawn so faintly that most people have stopped looking for it. The 2026 election will ask voters whether Alex Borg can make that line visible again. That is the question Abela has been answering, three days at a time, since he first sat down.