No amount of verbose explanations from the government about how the new power station is the best thing for the country possibly since electricity itself will compensate for the need for a clear-cut explanation of the straightjacket deal that the government has struck for the country's power supply.
But that is exactly what the government did when confronted with an article on Wednesday evening reporting leaked emails from the consortium running the power station reporting how the country is paying dearly, and losing millions upon millions of euros, from those shady deals struck with Azerbaijan on those secret trips to the regime by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his chief of staff Keith Schembri and then energy minister Konrad Mizzi - the main Maltese actors in the Panama Papers saga.
Since then, the government appears to have moved heaven and earth to have gotten this deal off the ground, and perhaps the only reason was not only because it was one of the cornerstones of its 2013 election campaign, along with those pledges of an end to corruption, transparency and accountability. Well, at least one of those pledges was brought to fruition.
From those state guarantees to the possibility of having to purchase the entire private power station, and from having to pay higher prices for electricity to being lumped with an 18-year power purchase agreement, the government has truly left no stone unturned in its mission to get the Delimara power station up and running on LNG and on very particular terms.
And in the process the Maltese taxpayer and electricity consumer has been left exposed to the deal in a number of ways.
First, those state guarantees on the power station's debt. This had started out with a secret €88 million loan guarantee that was only brought to light by the media. That €88 million was later increased to a whopping €360 million state guarantee. That guarantee was extended just days before last June's snap general election, and it was extended yet again last September.
That heavy exposure had even left the government exposed in the form of a Share Call Option Agreement commitment stands over and above, but is related to, the government's controversial state guarantee of €360 million for loan facilities amounting to €450 million that it had granted to Electrogas.
Added to the exorbitant rates apparently being paid for the purchase of LNG through Azerbaijan, is the huge discrepancy in the price of electricity purchased from Malta's interconnector to the European electricity grid compared to that of the new power station.
Figures have showed how in 2015, the year in which the interconnector was commissioned, Malta had sourced 47 per cent of its electricity from the European grid while last year that amount had increased to no less than 68 per cent.
As a study published by this newsroom showed, in 2016, when close to 70 per cent of the country's energy needs were purchased from the interconnector, the sole use of the Delimara power station would have cost the country €84 million more in 2016 than it had using the interconnector.
In the meantime, the government has bound he country to purchase its electricity from Delimara at 9c5 for the first five years of the installation's lifespan and for a total of 18 years from the Azerbaijani state corporation SOCAR for a presumably still to be negotiated unit price.
Partit Demokratiku yesterday called for an independent investigation into the whole SOCAR/Electrogas deal. And the very least the government could do, if it has nothing to hide, would be to open itself up to such an investigation.
The long and short of it is that the Delimara power station may be running on cleaner natural gas, but something nevertheless certainly does stink. The public deserves clear answers, the kind that only an independent investigation into this sordid affair would be able to provide.