It was a curious situation on Tuesday when, for the first time since its inception, journalists were not invited down to The Granaries to have a look at the preparations underway for last night’s Isle of MTV concert.

Don’t get us wrong, we are not particularly upset about having missed out on what is essentially a photo opportunity.  What is upsetting, however, are the underlying currents and why, exactly, this particular press call was not issued this year.

In a nutshell, the reason, we suspect, that the press was not invited to the event, and only received a press release after the fact, is that Minister Konrad Mizzi was not willing to suffer yet another round of questions unrelated to the subject matter at hand. 

He was not willing to face the usual uncomfortable questions the press throws at him every time he shows his face in public.  He did not want those pesky questions about Panama and 17 Black to come up in front of the foreign dignitaries he was hosting.

And this in itself shows how completely untenable his position as tourism minister actually is.

The tourism minister should really be the face of Malta and all that it has to offer the world, that person needs to be the nation’s flag-bearer and provide good reasons to visit the country.

Even if one were to assume for a minute that Mizzi is completely guiltless, his position is still completely untenable.

That is because everything that he does or says is superseded by the Panama Papers questions.  This may because the Prime Minister never addressed this situation properly and put a definitive lid on it.

That is, perhaps, because there is no way of really doing that.  Mizzi has explained his overseas financial adventures away as ‘family planning’, which did not wash, and he even commissioned an audit, which turned out to be nothing but a whitewashing exercise, which, incidentally, did not work either.  He had also commissioned from the tax commissioner himself, and he said that he would publish that audit, but that never materialised.

The ramifications of Mizzi’s actions, and the fact that they have gone completely unpunished, are leaving some very serious residual problems for the country.  Mizzi was, after all, the only European Union minister exposed by the Panama Papers and as such, he is the only EU minister to have been investigated as a result of those revelations, and as a result, Malta is the only country embedded in this quagmire.

It seems every time he sets a foot in public the press is onto Mizzi like a pack of wolves.  And yes, if the press had gone on Tuesday, they certainly would have bombarded Mizzi with these questions, and they will every time.

There are so many questions left unanswered here that the press is duty-bound to ask those questions at every opportunity and the minister, well aware of this fact from past experience, must have been more than a little reticent about them being brought up in front of the bigwigs from MTV.

Embarrassing, Konrad?  Well you now know how much of the country feels thanks to your shenanigans.

That is precisely what makes his position so untenable.