Kevin Cassar’s piece on Marvin Gaerty is a prosecution brief dressed as commentary. It is one-sided, selects its facts carefully, and arrives at a predetermined conclusion. It deserves a direct response.
Before anything else, one biographical fact deserves to be stated clearly because it is absent from Cassar’s account. Marvin Gaerty did not arrive at the Commissioner for Revenue’s office through political patronage. He built his career through the institution itself, rising through the ranks to head the Tax Compliance Unit during the years of the Nationalist Party government. He was trusted by the PN to lead the department’s compliance function. He was subsequently appointed Commissioner by Labour. That is not the record of a partisan appointment. It is the record of a professional who commanded the confidence of both sides of the political divide over a long career in public service. Cassar’s framing of Gaerty as a Labour loyalist rewarded for political silence collapses entirely against that fact.
Kevin Cassar
The most important legal fact in the entire story is the one Cassar disposes of in a single subordinate clause. A magisterial inquiry examined the WhatsApp exchanges he quotes, investigated the same conduct, and found no criminal liability. That is not a technicality. It is the conclusion of a serious judicial process with full investigative powers. In any system that takes due process seriously, it is where the matter ends.
The exchanges were informal and, as Gaerty himself acknowledged, unwise in tone. But informality is not corruption. The question that would determine whether actual impropriety occurred is whether the Fenech family’s tax position was handled differently from how it should have been. Cassar does not establish that it was. He establishes that the tone was inappropriate. Those are different things.
What Cassar’s article omits entirely is what Marvin Gaerty actually built during his years as Commissioner for Revenue. He led the tax authority through the most extraordinary period of economic growth Malta had ever recorded, and he did so with a level of professional competence and institutional innovation that transformed how the department operated. Under his leadership the Revenue department modernised its processes, embraced digital transformation, and projected to the international business community the image of a tax authority that was efficient, accessible and fit for a growing economy.
One of the most significant and least discussed aspects of his tenure is the approach he took toward tax enforcement. In previous eras, tax irregularities could and did lead to criminal indictments, court proceedings, and in some cases imprisonment. Families lost businesses. Individuals lost their reputations and their liberty over tax matters that in many cases were the result of poor accounting or honest dispute rather than deliberate fraud. Gaerty changed that.
He built an approach to enforcement that distinguished between genuine evasion and administrative failure, that prioritised resolution over prosecution, and that gave businesses and individuals a route to regularise their position without the threat of criminal proceedings hanging over them. That saved families, saved businesses, and spared many people undue hardship that served neither justice nor the public interest.
Equally important is what Gaerty did not do. He was never pressured into using the criminal investigation powers of the Revenue department as a political instrument against public figures or individuals with tax arrears, and he resisted any such pressure when it arose. In a small country where the line between institutional independence and political convenience is easily blurred, that independence is not a small thing. It is the difference between a tax authority that operates under the rule of law and one that operates under the rule of whoever is in power.
Cassar ends by suggesting that Gaerty’s subsequent appointments were made because Abela is “eternally obliged” to him. This is an allegation of political corruption presented without a shred of evidence. If Cassar has evidence, he should produce it. If he does not, he should not write it.
Marvin Gaerty served in one of the most demanding institutional roles in Malta. He rose through the ranks under a Nationalist government, was appointed Commissioner under a Labour government, was investigated, was cleared of criminal liability, and built a revenue authority that the country’s fastest growing economy needed and deserved.
He was professional, innovative, humane in his enforcement philosophy, and independent in his decision making. He deserves to be judged on the totality of that record, not on a selection of WhatsApp messages taken out of context by someone with an obvious political purpose.
