Last Saturday morning the leading article of this newspaper took Finance Minister Edward Scicluna to task for having failed to issue any sort of statement in the wake of last week’s Standard and Poor’s report.

That report had raised some very serious issues, not least of which was their highlighting of the increased reputational and operational risks Malta’s banking sector is facing, and increased its overall risk rating by 50 per cent, from four to six-out-of-10

But since last Thursday the government was stone cold silent on the S&P report, having conveniently chosen to ignore the bad news.

But lo and behold, on Saturday morning we had not one but two press releases from the government about a more favourable rating, this time from Fitch, which the finance ministry appears to have liked an awful lot more than that of the rival credit rating agency the day before.

Now we cannot say that the S&P report did not go by uncommented, in fact it was the Central Bank of Malta and the Malta Financial Services Authority who, quite out of the norm, stepped in to comment on the S&P finding – an area usually explicitly reserved for the finance ministry of late and, if memory serves, this must have been one of, if not the only, time these two bodies have issued press releases in the wake of a credit agency report.

This situation raises the question as to who the actual finance minister is: is it Edward Scicluna, who it must be said is not often shy about addressing thorny fiscal issues, or is it a nameless, faceless government functionary who decides what the finance minister gets to say or not say.

Whoever those people are were not present the morning after the arrest of the chairman of a Maltese bank when he told a local news portal: “U ejja, come on. You’re going to ask these questions so early in the morning?”

Like the arrest of the bank chairman, the S&P report was an alarm bell that is not to be ignored or treated lightly, not even in isolation, let alone within the wider context of the microscope that Malta’s financial services sector is under with the European banking Authority issue, the tax-avoiding letterbox companies the country hosts, its citizenship-selling scheme, its hosting of so many iGaming companies, the EU’s questions about our rule of laws in the area and, of course, the very long shadow that the Panama Papers continues to cast over the country.

The Prime Minister has put it down to the jealousy of other countries, and the finance minister has said that we are picked on because we are a small country and that those Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit reports were merely written to be leaked.

Ignoring inconvenient situations will not cut it in this day and age, and when such news comes out at least the country’s foreign and institutional investors need to be assured that not only the country’s finances, but the country’s financial services sector is in good hands.

But the thing is such people do not cherry-pick the positives out of credit agency reports, nor are they fooled by the news the government chooses to disseminate or to not disseminate.

The government needs to realise that while it may bury its own head in the sand, it cannot force others to do the same.