Following the commotion in the lead up to and during the election campaign over a number of reports drawn up by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit raised by the opposition and sections of the press, one would have thought that the government would have ensured that one of its first orders of business would have been to instil confidence in the country’s investigative institutions that a large proportion of the country saw as having failed them.
That, however, has not happened. In fact, just the opposite appears to have come to pass.
The government this week has remained completely silent on the news broken by Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi that two top officials at the FIAU were removed after the election. The MP claimed that a witch-hunt was underway at the Unit.
As anyone in Malta is acutely aware of, the last general election had been called after allegations were made that the Prime Minister’s wife was the secret owner of a secret Panamanian company set up alongside those which were opened by the prime Minister’s own chief of staff and one of his chief ministers. Both of the latter have acknowledged ownership of those companies but the owner of the third company, the infamous Egrant, had been kept under wraps.
And it was when accusations that Prime Minister’s wife was the actual owner of Egrant that the Prime Minister requested a magisterial inquiry to prove the allegation was untrue and he called an election to effectively ask the people for a vote of confidence in him.
He got the vote of confidence but the magisterial inquiry is still underway.
But those accusations had nothing to do with the FIAU, these allegations came from a whistleblower who had worked at Pilatus Bank and who claims to have seen Mrs Muscat’s name on papers showing ownership of that company.
After that the figurative floodgates opened and numerous reports drawn up by the FIAU began being leaked to the media, and to this publishing house in particular, and to the opposition leader after he pleaded for people with information to come forward. And come forward they did.
Those FIAU reports, which had been sent to the police for follow up investigations which lied idle on shelves gathering dust for months on end, contained accusations against the PM’s chief of staff and claimed he was involved in money laundering and the receipt of kickbacks from the contentious sale of Maltese citizenships.
Other FIAU reports implicated the former energy minister in having received kickbacks from the sale of Enemalta and the purchase of another major bone of contention, the LNG tanker berthed in Marsaxlokk Bay used to fuel the new power station that, the opposition argues, is not even necessary.
But were the firing at the FIAU part of a witch-hunt, as Azzopardi claims, aimed at weeding out anyone responsible for having leaked those reports, or is it a matter of weeding out the people who were responsible for drawing up the reports in the first place, and silencing them and p0reventing them from talking further action in the wake of the police’s inaction?
Of further concern is the fact that the two FIAU employees were dismissed just after Finance Minister Edward Scicluna had remarked to the media that the reports in question may have been written in order for them to be leaked.
The FIAU is an understandably secretive institution and the whole truth behind what, exactly, transpired may never have been known, unless the government does something about it.
At this point commonsense would dictate the government to make a statement about the reports that never saw the light of day and about the sackings from the FIAU, as this is a matter that casts the government’s influence on institutions that are meant to be autonomous in a very dubious light indeed.
If the government insists on maintaining its silence, it will bode very badly for Malta’s credibility as law-abiding country. And the country can ill-afford more any further knocks to its credibility.
These goings on at the FIAU, the government’s possible hand in all of this as well as the government’s silence on the issue inspire very little confidence in this or indeed any state institution at all.