This week’s visit to Malta by the European Commission was a wonderfully orchestrated affair. The dignitaries’ speeches and platitudes were all conducted with barely a hitch or hiccup, the dancers at the Mediterranean Conference Centre were also all in time and the media in its coverage hardly missed a beat.
It was smiles and back slapping all around, the Opposition and the hostile media were, by and large, kept safely at bay, with the one exception at Delimara. There was hardly any of that negativity which the government of the day dislikes so much – with the exception of course of those renegade members of the press corps who, most treacherously, chose to bring up those Panama Papers and that long-awaited audit into a minister’s financial affairs.
Everything went smoothly and according to plan, apart from that pesky intervention by the Opposition leader when the European Commissioners paid a visit to Parliament, and he treasonously chose to bring up that trifling matter of the government’s perceived corruption and the Panama Papers.
The country’s first consignment of LNG arrived bang on time, as did the European Commission’s announcement of its approval of the state aid the government has given to the operators of the new and improved Delimara power station. The government trolls on the social media fell quickly into step and interpreted the announcement as one sanctioning the entire multifaceted deal and not what it actually was: the approval of state aid for the power station project from the public coffers.
The European Commissioner for Energy, bang on cue, rightly praised Malta’s efforts and success in converting the country’s energy supply to natural gas before a beaming de facto Maltese energy minister.
If only it weren’t for those meddling journalists hell bent on quizzing the minister, before he made a quick getaway in his ministerial car, about that that anticipated audit into his financial affairs and his once-but-no-longer secret company in Panama with the purported aim of collecting ‘brokerage’ fees that he set up right after being elected.
All in all, everything went according to the pre-ordained plan and the government functionaries that arranged it all certainly must have breathed a sigh of relief when the stage lights were dimmed last Wednesday and the circus left town.
Now for the next bit of extraordinary timing that is still to come.
That de facto energy minister has been under intense and unrelenting fire for the last 11 months since the content of the Panama Papers revealed his financial escapades and shenanigans in Panama, New Zealand and in the numerous countries in which his accountants, and not him of course, attempted to open bank accounts attached to that once secret Panamanian company.
He said on Wednesday that the public will very soon be in a position to know all the facts about his financial structures.
In so doing, he confirmed this newspaper’s article last Sunday which reported that that audit would be published – again, in an extraordinary happenstance of timing – to coincide with a fact-finding mission to Malta by the European Parliament’s Panama Papers investigative committee.
That committee is clearly keen to question the minister and, if past comments on the prospect of being interrogated are anything to go by, he will be most reluctant to do so.
Malta is certainly in the EP’s crosshairs. And while the government may believe it has managed to avoid the true brunt of the Panama Papers scandal by burying its head in the sand as far as its Maltese opposition and population is concerned, such ploys will serve it no good whatsoever when it comes time to answer to the European Parliament.
Perhaps the ploy here is to publish the audit by the still unknown but allegedly reputable auditing firm during the EP committee’s visit, or perhaps in the lead-up to that visit, so as to avoid the committee’s scrutiny. Once the audit is published, the government or the minister could very well turn around and hold up the audit as a waiver from undesired questioning.
Will the audit be used as an excuse to avoid the committee’s questions? Only time will tell the answer to that. Perhaps that audit, supposedly 11 months in the making, has been ready for some time now. Should that turn out to be the case, it would be a national insult.
The people of this country have been waiting an awfully long time for that audit and to think that the government has been sitting on it only to release it at the most opportune time would be, after all that has come to pass in the meantime, utterly deplorable. It would also show an utter contempt for the Maltese public at large.
That audit, once published, will make for interesting reading indeed. And it remains to be seen how any reputable auditing firm could say with any conviction whatsoever how it has found no trace of wrongdoing in a financial jurisdiction as opaque as Panama. It will also be interesting to see how – after 11-odd months of plotting and planning by what are undoubtedly very creative accountants and auditors in the minister’s pay – the minister’s questionable deeds are given a sheen of respectability.
All this remains to be seen – not now but sometime in the near future because timing, after all, is everything.