Apparently, it is not sufficiently grave and offensive that for the last year this country has had to contend with a Prime Minister who defends and protects his chief of staff and closest ‘pet’ cabinet minister when they are discovered to have set up textbook money-laundering structures composed of a company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand. The Prime Minister now wishes to compound the immense gravity of the situation by clinging on while defending himself against accusations that the not-so-mysterious third company set up in concert with the two owned by his henchmen is held by Panama nominees for his wife.
The spectacle of him, clutching a print-out of my blog-post in which I transcribed – faithfully – the text of two ‘declaration of trust’ documents, clutching at straws by pointing out “evidence” that the documents are “fake” (and shooting himself in the foot while doing so), is tragic for Malta. Not only is this absolutely not how a prime minister should ever behave – if he has reached that point of disgrace, it is time for him to go, and it was time long ago – but it is also completely not how an innocent man would speak and conduct himself. Even his most devoted supporters have reached the point where they are picking up the universally and subconsciously readable signals of somebody who is not innocent at all.
If we are of normal psychology – that is, not sociopaths or psychopaths, not narcissists or individuals with a criminal bent – we know how we would react in that situation. If somebody says that we have done something that we would never, in a million years, bring ourselves to do, we would react by saying so. That is exactly what we would say, immediately and instinctively: “What? Of course not! Never in a million years would I ever do something like that. I am not that sort of person and it is completely wrong.” And we would stick to that, right through. An innocent person does not think in terms of lines of defence – except in a court of law, where it is utterly necessary – but in terms of statement of fact. And if you are innocent of the accusation that you have a company in Panama which you set up to launder money and defraud the government you run, then you say so, you say just that, and you don’t run about town holding press conferences and issuing statements that nit-pick at details, particularly when the nit-picking (like the place of birth on an identity card) bolsters the arguments of your accusers and not yours.
Some people have been completely foxed by the manner in which the Prime Minister called a late-evening press conference on Thursday and solemnly swore – without the requisite copy of the Bible, crucifix or Constitution of Malta, of course – that he does not have a company in Panama and nor does any member of his family. Incidentally, he was wrong to bring in his family, because nobody can ever swear about or attest to companies that family members may or may not own, when they are by their very nature designed for maximum secrecy. This is because good people, which means most people, don’t tell serious untruths so brazenly. Psychological research studies have shown that people are uncomfortable with telling lies even when those lies create advantages for themselves, because it lessens their own self-respect and poisons their self-perception.
The Prime Minister’s brazen statements disturb even me, who knows what I know. So I can imagine how they confound others, who prefer to think – for their own sanity – that nobody, still more a prime minister, would be so outrageous. I remind myself that I have seen it happen already with the Minister for the Economy. Despite knowing for a fact that he was there at that place in Velbert, in Germany, last January – because the man who told me, who is somebody I know and not just some random stranger, rang right there and then from the premises, having just encountered the Minister and his person of trust in the shower. And yet I have had to contend with the show of the Minister issuing fascistic statements, abusively, through the government’s Department of Information, calling me a liar, with four libel suits – two filed by each of them – and with a garnishee order on my assets to the tune of almost €50,000. I have to remind myself that these are not normal people we are dealing with, that they are actually quite dangerous, and that dangerous people will lie through their teeth even at the best of times, let alone when their survival hinges perilously on it.
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