Konrad Mizzi was on television with Beppe Fenech Adami (and Carmel Cacopardo of AD) and threatened to sue Fenech Adami if he read from a transcript of Simon Busuttil’s speech in parliament. Fenech Adami read from the transcript because 1) he doesn’t give a damn; 2) he knows he’s right; 3) anything said in parliament, like anything said on the witness stand in court (except in certain circumstances where privacy applies) is privileged information which means that you cannot sue for libel; 4) you can’t sue somebody for reading something out when you are the one who asked him to do so; 5) neither Busuttil nor Fenech Adami said that Mizzi has millions in Panama, but that the structure he set up is the sort used for the laundering of large sums of money and that there is no other rational purpose.

But Mizzi had painted himself into a corner. He had announced in front of a very large television audience that if Fenech Adami read it out, he would sue in the morning. And so, of course, he had no choice but to do so even though the whole thing is going to blow up in his face and by the time the case drags through the Courts of Justice, the end result will have long become totally irrelevant and will have been superseded by events – just like his case against me, in which he also involved the police for a criminal suit, about his “marriage”.

And just as he had done when he sued me about his marriage and the reason Mrs Mizzi had bolted to Shanghai where she remains almost three years later, Konrad Mizzi used the services of the government’s Department of Information to release a press statement about his personal business and his personal law suit. Back then, we were treated to the farcical spectacle of the Malta government’s Department of Information issuing a statement about the felicitous state of the Health and Energy Minister’s marriage. Yesterday, the same official channels were used to communicate the Health and Energy Minister’s personal threats and insults to the deputy leader of the Opposition.

All the government minister cares about now is the headline. He imagines that people in their manifold thousands will say “Oh, he sued. Therefore he must be completely innocent.” That’s not going to happen. For a start, Mizzi himself revealed that he has a trust in New Zealand after being prompted to do so by the suspicion (well founded) that I knew about it. He did not reveal that he also had a company in Panama, but was forced to admit to it after I revealed it myself. So the company in Panama and the trust in New Zealand are two facts which cannot be disputed. Even if there were no documentary evidence to support their existence (there is), he has admitted to their existence himself. Secondly, evidence exists that he set up his company in Panama and his trust in New Zealand in concert with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who has the exact same set up except that, in his case, he is the beneficiary of his trust and Mizzi is not.

The same documentary evidence shows that Mizzi and Schembri began the process for setting up these asset-concealing vehicles at the time they were negotiating with Azerbaijan. Mizzi himself admitted, whether intentionally or by a slip of the tongue when under pressure from the press, how he set up his Panama and New Zealand structures on the advice of Keith Schembri. He did not, however, say that Schembri has the exact same things and that they did it together. He has clearly been given strict instructions not to do so because Schembri himself is avoiding all press scrutiny and refusing to answer questions from the media. He hasn’t admitted to anything, especially not to the secret companies he already held in the British Virgin Islands at the time of his appointment as the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

Put simply, nobody believes Konrad Mizzi in the light of all this because he has no explanation for why he would need a company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand. He has no explanation because there can be no legal one. You do not set up a company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand to hold your savings, your house in London (we need more information on how he bought that and paid it off an average corporate salary in just four years) and your government salary. Any such suggestion is quite idiotic. At this point, it doesn’t even matter whether that company in Panama has been used to launder money or not yet. The intention in setting it up is clear to all but the financially illiterate and the completely uninformed and naïve.

It’s not time for Konrad Mizzi to go, but time for all three of them to say goodbye and to leave us alone, to stop molesting the country: Joseph Muscat and his two henchmen, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com