It was the morning after the 2008 general election, an election fought on a knife-edge. On TVM, the experts were ad-libbing, since the boxes had not yet been opened.

One of the experts, Professor Edward Scicluna, ventured an opinion. "I don't know the result," he said, "but from the body language around us I have a clear idea who is winning."

He meant that Labour was winning, and he was wrong. PN won by the slightest of margins.

He was revealing his inner feelings, his deep-rooted support for Labour. When the next election came round, he was a Labour candidate and was appointed Minister for Finance in Joseph Muscat's first Cabinet.

There were other candidates for that post, but Professor Scicluna was chosen. He has kept his post not just in the first Muscat legislature but also in the second.

His tenure has been quite a success. The Maltese economy has soared, the deficit has been removed, unemployment is at a historic low and growth is at a Eurozone record level. Of course, Scicluna is not the only person responsible for this success. The merit must go to the Labour administration as a whole which took the grave decision to reduce the electricity rates to stimulate growth.

There were other contributors to this success: workers from other countries continued to flow into Malta to work at cheap rates since they did not have this in their own countries. The Nationalists sometimes claim they began the turnaround but you would not find many who believe that.

The minister cut quite a dashing figure at the Ecofin meetings with his professorial air and was often portrayed joking with dour Schauble, the German minister. There was even talk of being a candidate for the Eurogroup presidency but a Portuguese got there before him.

Now all this carefully assembled merit is crumbling around his head and the minister is quite frankly losing it.

For a long time the minister has stayed somewhat aloof from the allegations of scandal surrounding the Muscat government but he has now been inevitably roped in. The latest declaration by the European Banking Association with regard to the FIAU's handling of allegations regarding money laundering by the Pilatus Bank cuts across the ministerial remit both as regards FIAU and also as regards MFSA .

The minister knows he is dealing with quite superior forces and he can look around and see what is happening in other countries facing similar issues - such as Latvia, Estonia and the like. He realizes one doesn't mess around with EBA, ECB and the top echelons of the EU.

The EBA was quite specific in what it wanted FIAU to do but the latter responded with a short statement rich in superficial tones. The minister replied that a legal reply (hopefully not from the same legal team that gave carte blanche to Pilatus) would be forthcoming. EBA gave FIAU a two-week deadline, which by my reckoning is about now.

Then the minister took to writing and his article in The Times (Wednesday) shows a minister who has lost his cool air and who is defending the fort alone.

He claimed that all the inquiries lodged against Malta are being instigated by one and only one man, MEP David Casa. Not umpteen committees in the European Parliament, or ECB and EBA committees but just Mr Casa, raised to superhero levels by Minister Scicluna.

Then he laid into his Opposition counterpart, Mario de Marco, who the previous day had penned a rather tame article on the same subject. Scicluna's counterblast: de Marco was guilty of abandoning a parliamentary discussion on financial services to rush to defend a client of his who was accused of money laundering offences.

The next day the Opposition leader gave a press conference, and, quite unnecessarily I thought, did not allow de Marco to reply to the inevitable question but replied with a lawyer's (but not a politician's) stock reply that a lawyer is a court official and just doing his duty.

Obviously, ONE and the Labour media went to town with that. The minister must have thought he had got away with it and must have congratulated himself for taking a leaf out of his leader's book and turned the tables.

But the EBA top levels are not ONE viewer, nor is Moneyval from the Council of Europe which is on its way here. They know, as the Maltese public does not, about the many resignations there have been in other countries tainted by money laundering scandals, except in scandal-free Malta. The citadel has held fast, so far, Muscat, Mizzi and Schembri still reign (and joke about it). So far.

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