You have to wonder what the Prime Minister hoped to achieve with his cabinet ‘reshuffle’ last Thursday, if not another paragraph in the political suicide note he has been busy writing for the last three years.

In the thick of the Panama Papers crisis, when the calls for him to boot out Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri had reached a crescendo, I had written that those calls were pointless because the Prime Minister couldn’t sack either of them. He is in league with them and has no choice but to keep them on. I wrote that he was going to brazen it out and leave them in their positions – precisely because there was no alternative for him. But if the pressure increased and he realised that he had to do something about it, I wrote, then he would find some way of removing Mizzi and Schembri from their official positions while keeping them on in the backroom to carry on doing exactly what they were doing before with him. And he would take on the energy portfolio and Projects Malta himself. Projects Malta is the limited liability company which the government set up as a deal-maker and deal-broker, which receives tenders and expressions of interest for major government projects. Very tellingly, though this went largely unremarked upon, Projects Malta was placed from day one in Konrad Mizzi’s portfolio, alongside energy, though it has nothing to do with energy and should more properly have been the portfolio of the Finance Ministry.

My assessment of the situation was overall correct except that I misread the real extent of Mizzi’s and Schembri’s hold on the Prime Minister – with what they know, they have the power to blackmail him and hold him to ransom. I am in no doubt at all that Muscat would have wanted to take the route I have just described: it was the only possible temporary way out for him – until people discovered the real nature of Mizzi’s and Schembri’s activities in that backroom, and it fits perfectly with what we have seen so far of his way of doing things.

But Mizzi and Schembri were clearly going nowhere. They want their official positions, and if they were going down, then they were going to take Muscat with them. Then, of course, there is Brian Tonna, who of all four of them knows the most. By the nature of his work and what he has done for them, he knows everything – every last detail. He’s going nowhere, either. He’s still got his desk in the Office of the Prime Minister and he has engaged a lawyer to deflect questions about his business – even though that business is very much a public interest matter and the public most certainly have a right to know about the shady Panama, New Zealand and British Virgin Islands operations of politicians, whether they are elected like Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat, who denied, once and with a shifty gesture, owning offshore companies but has not been pressed on the matter since, or unelected like Keith Schembri.

The Prime Minister has said that Keith Schembri is not a politician. Of course he is. Politicians don’t have to be candidates or members of parliament. They are people who work professionally in politics, whether they hold elected office or not. Schembri has been working for the Labour Party since Muscat became leader in 2008. He led the Labour Party’s so-called ‘energy committee’ and organised sources of funding for the party war-chest. He also organised many of the deals which the party struck while in Opposition, to implement when it achieved power. As the Prime Minister’s closest associate and aide, Keith Schembri is also a political exposed person (PEP) as defined under European law which has been transposed into Maltese law. As a PEP, he is exposed to heightened scrutiny by the fiscal authorities and the banks, and his financial affairs – as stipulated under the law – can be scrutinised by the press, parliament and the public. The press and parliament are, in fact, empowered at law to ask for details of the financial affairs of PEPs.

Yet the Prime Minister says that he will retain his aide because he is not an elected person and not accountable to the public. I have noticed that the Prime Minister is far more protective of Schembri than he is of Mizzi. He becomes defensive when challenged about him in a way that he does not when asked about Mizzi. This, too, is particularly telling – one is left with the distinct sensation that he does not do so out of personal affection, loyalty or friendship, but because there is some kind of vested interest there which is worrying him.

And then, of course, we have the return of Manuel Mallia to the cabinet as Minister for Gambling. I had thought that sleazy Chris Cardona, who spends most of his time hanging about with shady characters in bars like Hugo’s Lounge, the Stable and Level 22, was the worst possible choice as minister responsible for gambling, remote gaming and casinos, given the criminal underbelly of the industry. But now I see that I was badly wrong about that. Muscat has brought in Manuel Mallia, a criminal defence lawyer who loves the underworld and does not keep sufficient professional distance from it, instead.

 

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