The biggest farce in this ongoing black comedy called “The Strange Case of JosephKonrad and the Amazing Panama Company” was the sight and sound of the Minister for Health and Energy addressing an assembly of reporters after he had just been elected the Labour Party’s deputy leader for party affairs. He was extremely keen to impress upon them the extent of his wealth and riches, and how he acquired these riches through his own hard graft, working in London and leaving home on Monday only to return home on Friday. “It’s my money, and I worked for it,” he said. He stood there and spoke about managing his riches and his family’s estate, about how this trust in New Zealand and this company in Panama are absolutely essential and how it’s his business and how he can do with his riches as he pleases.

I sat there watching (as no doubt thousands of others did) and thought, What? Is this man really boasting about how rich he is when he has declared nothing of that nature to Parliament? In his most recent declaration of assets and liabilities, Konrad Mizzi listed a flat in Sliema, a house and garage in London, 4,000 shares in Malta International Airport plc, €310,000 deposited in the bank and €320,000 owed to the bank. Nothing there warrants any sort of trust, let alone a trust in New Zealand which holds a company in secretive and blacklisted Panama. Plenty of people in Malta have companies which own their real estate, but those companies are set up in Malta. There is absolutely no reason to set up a company in Panama to own a house, let alone to own the small Sliema flat in which you live.

This is exactly why Konrad Mizzi spent a good 12 minutes boasting about his “wealth” and “my money”. It’s because he knows that nobody incorporates a company in Panama (or anywhere else in an offshore haven) simply to hold a Sliema flat, a London house and 4,000 shares in an airport company in Malta. So he has to build the myth that he has some mysterious but legitimately earned funds somewhere that he equally mysteriously earned by working for five years as a corporate drone on a salary in London and, before that, as a civil servant and Enemalta employee in Malta. And none of the reporters there, probably because they were so gobsmacked by his stuttering boasting, asked him the single most important question: if you have all this legitimately earned money, as you claim, from your years in London, then why wasn’t it declared to Parliament? Lying to Parliament is a resignation matter.

This means that in trying to worm himself out of a very tight corner, Mizzi immediately painted himself into another one. There he was, boasting about his immense wealth which necessitates estate planning via Panama and New Zealand, so as to justify (uselessly) his use of those secretive vehicles. But meanwhile, he has declared none of that wealth to Parliament and, it follows, to the financial authorities in Malta. That is why so many people who watched him were completely aghast.

Equally laughable is his claim that Panama was necessary for “family estate planning” – for example, if he wishes to rent out his house, the rent will be paid into the company in Panama. Who is he trying to kid? You don’t set up a company in Panama to receive rent from a house in London, an entirely legitimate source of income and one which is not that exceptional. And you can’t do it, either. Banks in Europe will not transfer payments to offshore companies in Panama – and if you try to transfer money from an offshore company in Panama to a bank in Europe, it’s just not going to happen. So if Mizzi’s aim in setting up a Panama company were really to receive rent from his London house (hasn’t it been sold, anyway?), this is the worst thing he could possibly do. He will find it impossible to make and receive payments.

But you don’t set up a Panama company to receive rent from a house anyway. And you certainly don’t set it up to hold the small Sliema flat in which you live (and which, because you live in it, can’t generate income). If that were the case, why don’t all of us who own our homes – and the vast majority of adults in Malta do – set up companies in Panama to ‘manage’ them? The sight of Mizzi trying to justify his mess was almost pathetic. But really, it was shocking and insulting.

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