After some six months since the Panama Data Dump, the long knives in Malta are still out, and endlessly sharpened, in an unrelenting quest to claim as trophies the scalps of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

One tends to overlook that Malta has an enlightened electorate that at its moment of truth made its wisest choice in years in giving us a political leadership steeped in the most commendable principles that has driven us to levels never experienced before.

The Mriehel and the Townsquare projects are but puny aspirants to such lofty ideals.

Not to betray these principles, the front-line, no-nonsense defender against those scalps becoming political trophies, has laid his fortunes on the line taking a storm of flak yet standing his ground with the most enviable aplomb.

Among those eleven-and-a-half million documents that caused the planet to wobble, we are told that the Russian leader has some US$2 billion dollars stashed away for a Siberian polar day out of reach of his country’s taxman.

And hardly a Russian voice of dissent (out of some 140 million natives) has been raised.

Yet here in Malta, two of our leading lights have been vilified for putting away for safe-keeping what really amounts to loose change.

A yearly amount of loose change that will take each of the men 2000 years to come any near to what Putin has siphoned off out of his country.

What gives you nihilists the right to hold these family men (from humble yet proud working-class background) to higher standards than the Russian people hold their leader?

If anything, it is Putin who should be held to higher standards, for, unlike Keith and Konrad, the buck (OK, 2 billions of it) stops with him as the country’s leader.

Two weights, two measures like never before.

 

Joe Genovese