So is Sai Mizzi Liang coming back home to Malta and her husband the Cabinet Minister, now that her crony-contract with his government has lapsed, and a new consul appointed in Shanghai? Or is home now China again, where she and their son and daughter have been living for the last three years?

I think that at this stage the entire country, including the Cabinet Minister’s most avid supporters, are left in no doubt that she’s got no intention of ever coming back to the island she famously detested, except for the standard compulsory summer holiday with the children, to see their grandparents, which took place in July 2014, July last year and last July.

Meanwhile, Mrs Mizzi Liang’s unbelievably brass-necked husband continues to swan around offensively, behaving as though the discovery of his and his wife’s secret structures in Panama and New Zealand are just a brief, unpleasant episode that has now been put behind them. For let us not forget that his wife is just as involved as he is. Her name was splashed all over the hyper-secret New Zealand ‘container’ for his Panama company, and as a politically exposed person under European and Maltese law – she was an official emissary of a European Union government until last month – she should be subject to the same level of scrutiny and censure as her husband, in her own right, and not merely because she is his wife.

The Labour Party and its legions of ghastly trolls now have a serious problem as they can no longer stick their heads in the sand and pretend that Mrs Mizzi Liang packed up and left for Shanghai just five months into Muscat’s term as prime minister because she was the perfect person for the mysterious job. It would have been nobody’s business if she’d done a runner, were it not for the fact that the government paid her handsomely to flee.

Not that the more clued-up-in-life members of the Cabinet ever believed the lies Mizzi and Muscat told the newspapers, I imagine, though they never objected on behalf of the public they are supposed to serve because it is their personal and political interests which they put first. Look at Leo Brincat, the prime example of self-serving and unprincipled spinelessness. You certainly can’t call it natural justice when two Cabinet ministers of the violent, abusive, human-rights-violating and horrendously corrupt Mintoffian government of the 1980s end up holding public office at European Union level – Karmenu Vella as European Commissioner and Leo Brincat, who has yet to be approved in the European Parliament’s plenary session, as a member of the European Court of Auditors. Here again you see Joseph Muscat’s perverted cynicism at work.

Meanwhile, journalists and editors have done exactly what the Prime Minister hoped they would do – or should I say knew they would do – and given up chasing him on the matter of that fictitious ‘international audit’ of his pet Cabinet Minister’s tangled offshore company arrangements. Back in March, Muscat said that the audit had begun already and that the results would be published “soon” though “these things take time”. Because he was lying about the audit, it follows that he also lied – brazenly – when he said that it was being carried out by “an international firm”. When pressed by journalists to say which firm, he greased himself with Vaseline and slipped right out of the question, looking even shadier than he did already.

Journalists have given up asking Muscat about it because like everybody else, including members of the Labour Party who seem to have no scruples about lying to the public even though they probably have moments of unease at the situation, they have taken it for granted that the Prime Minister lied about the ‘international audit’ of Konrad Mizzi’s affairs, for reasons that should be obvious (he has no interest in having Mizzi’s affairs audited because Mizzi is his avowed henchman). In that case, what the newspapers should be doing is carrying stories about the Prime Minister’s blatant lying to the public in this regard. That the Prime Minister lies with a straight face to the people he was elected to serve is a major story, even in this island where we seem to accept having Labour leaders lie to us, as though they have some kind of special licence to do so.

 

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I think all but the most self-deluding are now perfectly clear in their minds that the only road-map Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri had was a pirates’ treasure map showing them the way to the public coffers, and that the only reason they wanted to seize control of the country – albeit by democratic means – was to make as much money for themselves as they possibly could. When they said they would run Malta like a business, they weren’t joking, but people didn’t pick up on the fact that they were going to treat it as their own personally-owned business.

I find that in general nobody believes them anymore, and that people are now divided between the disgusted, the cynical and the indifferent, all of whom are well aware that Muscat, Mizzi and Schembri are up to no good. The disgusted can’t wait to vote them out but are bracing themselves for their re-election all the same. The cynical are well aware that they are dealing with a bunch of crooks, but fall within two subcategories: those who are happy that they’re dealing with crooks because it makes it easier to get what they want, and those who are not delighted at having a government of crooks, but who are quite glad to go along with it and make as much money as they can by crouching cooperatively beneath the table with their hands cupped to catch the pretty large crumbs.

Then there are the indifferent, the ones who – flying in the face of all common sense – like to say that both political parties are the same and that it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. This makes them feel more intelligent and insightful than the common herd, but the reality is that they are merely irresponsible and detached.

 

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A few days ago somebody who sells Maltese passports told me that selling Maltese passports to Russians is a humanitarian service because some of these poor, suffering Russian multi-millionaires are trying to escape persecution by Vladimir Putin. I had to laugh. Is that how you square it with your troubled conscience, I asked? If you want to perform a humanitarian service for people fleeing persecution, work pro bono for the boat-people who are applying for asylum. But you can’t take tens of thousands of euros in commission for doing that.

 

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