The current worldwide scandal about the information contained in the Panama Papers really puts into stark, cold perspective the mad hysteria, back in February 2013, about a clock given as a gift to a Nationalist government politician who wasn’t even a cabinet minister at the time. Worse still is the realisation that all of that was orchestrated, by the very politicians who are now entangled in the Panama scandal, even as they laid their own corrupt networks in preparation for taking the seat of power.
Yes, while they were ranting on about Tonio Fenech’s clock, they were laying the groundwork for their companies in Panama and their trusts in New Zealand, and for their bank accounts in Dubai or Panama (which requests were turned down by the banks there) and whatever it was they planned to put in those bank accounts all along. The cynicism with which Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri manipulated public opinion in the years between 2008 and 2013, scheming and conniving to seize power because they saw government as a series of business opportunities, makes one nauseous.
It can’t be more obvious now that the Prime Minister won’t shed his chief of staff and his favourite minister, not even to save the government, because above all, he needs to save his own skin. It’s very telling that he’s saving his skin not by sacking them, but by defending them to the hilt, to the point where he has been quite happy to admit publicly that he has not even discussed resignation with them. That tells you one thing only: that he knew all along what they were up to, and that he knew because he is involved too.
That should have been apparent at the outset, even without his determined defence of them in the face of surging public anger. Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are the two individuals who the Prime Minister holds most closely to him. He has installed both in the Office of the Prime Minister – yes, even his Minister of Health and Energy. There is no way on earth those two would have acted as they did without the Prime Minister’s full knowledge, consent and cooperation. Commonsense tells you this: Keith Schembri’s primary relationship is not with Konrad Mizzi but with Muscat, to whom he has been close for more than two decades. Muscat is the reason why Schembri is in politics in the first place: Muscat brought him in to help with the scheming, campaigning and planning – and the networking for donations to the party’s war-chest.
Keith Schembri would never in a million years have gone off with Konrad Mizzi to set up a company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand, using his personal business accountant, behind Muscat’s back. It is inconceivable. Muscat knew what was going on; he is part of it, and that is why he can’t (not won’t) cut them loose even now that they have been caught with their pants down.
And that is why I don’t agree at all with the demands now being made for the Prime Minister to sack his chief of staff and his Minister for Health and Energy. All three of them have to go. This is a triad, and not a Prime Minister gulled by two of his men. The worst thing that can happen now is if the Prime Minister answers those calls for their sacking, and gets them to stand aside as a mise en scène while they carry on hatching and executing their corrupt plots and plans behind the scenes. This has got to end. The Labour Party can solve it with an internal coup that ousts Muscat along with his henchmen and replaces him with another leader and prime minister. The removal of Muscat need not necessarily mean the end of this term of government. It is quite possible to replace a prime minister in office. It happened in the early 1980s and it happened again when Eddie Fenech Adami stepped down shortly after signing Malta’s EU accession treaty.
If the Labour Party is going to survive this mess of corruption and public anger, then it has to bring down the surgical knife on the gangrene. And let this be a lesson to the rest of them that they shouldn’t tolerate just about anything and let themselves become complicit in wrong-doing, corruption and cronyism, in poor decisions and money-grubbing deals with dictators and sick operations like Henley & Partners, just for the thrill of being in power. It simply is not worth it. Look at the disaster now.
If the Labour Party is going to survive this mess of corruption and public anger, then it has to bring down the surgical knife on the gangrene
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