With each passing day and with each fresh Panamagate revelation, accusation and allegation, the fact that Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri continue to sit in office as though it is business as usual becomes more unacceptable.
What is equally unacceptable is the fact that the Prime Minister, to date, has not ordered any kind of investigation into the affair, and in the process, and in his utter defence of his right and left hand men, he has thrown every basic concept of good governance out the window.
Matters have now degenerated to such an extent that the government’s attitude and approach to the damning revelations over its dynamic duo’s international financial machinations has become nothing less than a glaring national insult.
The Prime Minister clearly lacks the mettle to do what he needs to do and his minister and chief of staff, despite their sporadic reactions to press reports, have failed to provide a decent and proper explanation to the accusations they are facing. Blanket denials will no longer suffice given the situation.
Such explanations are warranted whether there has been any wrongdoing on the part of Dr Mizzi and Mr Schembri or not – the public, and not just the Opposition, has demanded explanations and it is the public’s right to have those explanations.
The country cannot be expected to await the results of audits being performed on Dr Mizzi’s affairs, audits that, truth be told, will never be able to ascertain with any degree of certainty what the real situation is. The nation is also expected to wait for further ‘weeks’ according to the Prime Minister for these audit results, when those audits had already been ordered well over a month ago.
This is simply another means of buying time, as has been done time and time again by this administration when one of its top brass has faced serious accusations.
The country at large had cried foul over the actions of former minister Manuel Mallia and former parliamentary secretary Michael Falzon, but their transgressions can be described as mere misdemeanours in comparison to the capital crimes that have allegedly been committed by the two people who are, in effect, running the country at the Prime Minister’s side.
This now goes well beyond the realms of an innocuous or ‘naïve’ as the Prime Minister put it, opening of a company in a tax haven while in office, which was the initial excuse at the outset of the scandal.
New information coming to light thanks to the leaks of the Panama Papers has shed a whole new light on those initial allegations, and they have also showed how the minister, when he purported to have come clean by publishing documents on his Panama companies early last month, was having a laugh at the media’s and the nation’s expense.
Yesterday the Opposition Leader addressed the dissenting Members of the House sitting on the government benches, and appealed for them to consider the national interest when taking their votes next week in motion of no confidence in the government filed by the Opposition.
Cracks are showing in the Labour Party’s façade and there are a number of senior Labour politicians out there who have even publicly suggested that the two should step down or be made to step down on account of the accusations.
This, coupled with the widespread public outcry the Panama Papers have induced, should be enough for any self-respecting politician or senior civil servant to step down or to at least suspend themselves from duty until their names are cleared once and for all.
Short of that, any self-respecting Prime Minister should force them to do so, but for some reason neither course of action has been taken. This attitude, however, is pretty much par for the course for the current administration and one is beginning to expect no better despite from it, despite its lofty pre-electoral pledges of transparency and accountability.