By now it has dawned on everybody except the most wilfully blind that it is a not a matter of the Prime Minister being unwilling to force the resignations of his chief of staff and his favourite cabinet minister, but that he is unable to do so. Or rather, it’s both. He can’t demand their resignation and he doesn’t want to, either. All three of them are in it together, and it follows from this that Joseph Muscat doesn’t think Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri have done anything wrong and he would quite like to carry on as they are now.

I think I had better rephrase that. All three of them know they’re doing something wrong, which is why they hid it, but they want to do it anyway and it’s probably the chief reason they wanted to get into government.

Many may have forgotten at this stage – so much has happened in the last two months – that news of Mizzi’s secret company in Panama had broken already, a couple of days before, when Labour Party delegates were asked to vote to make him deputy leader. At that stage, Muscat should have scrapped plans for the election and asked for his resignation. But he didn’t (as we know), and instead literally rushed the election through, and Mizzi, the sole candidate, took 96% of the vote. But the news had clearly cast a pall over the proceedings, because when the news cameras arrived to frame Mizzi in shot, he was left to stand alone, with no beaming and congratulatory party officials or even Muscat keen to be caught on camera with him.And all the journalists were interested in asking him about was his Panama company and his New Zealand trust – not his plans for the Labour Party.

That was a clear message to us right there at the start of the mess: that Muscat went ahead with the election because he knew all along what Mizzi was up to, and it wasn’t because his man had shown him his draft declaration of assets a few weeks earlier. Who puts a secret Panama company or a secret trust in a declaration of assets to parliament? Who even writes a draft declaration of assets weeks before it is due in parliament and shows it to the Prime Minister? Nobody does. Those were more lies from the Prime Minister, right there. 

Muscat was in on it from the start, and that’s why he knew. He was in on it and therefore he wasn’t surprised, let alone shocked.He was in on it, and that’s exactly why he wanted to make Mizzi his deputy leader, so that they could do even more together of what they were doing already, unshackled in the Labour Party as they were unshackled already in the government. The public revelations a couple of days before the deputy leadership election seem to have made Muscat even more determined, not less so, to rush the process through

The story about Konrad Mizzi and his asset-concealing structures began to break on 22 February, with that now legendary picture of a New Zealand lamb closely followed by another picture of a man carrying a Panama hat. Mizzi was elected deputy leader three days later, on 25 February, and on 27 February I broke the news, on my website, of how the Prime Minister’s chief of staff has exactly the same set-up and the arrangements for both were made in concert with each other. The Prime Minister was clearly unfazed by any of this information. He was only disturbed by the fact that it had been discovered. At that stage, his main problem – and that of his two collaborators – was trying to work out how the information was discovered, what the source was, and how much those sources knew and had yet to reveal. So they played a waiting game (with one of them losing a great deal of weight in the process) while defying the press and lying to the public at every turn.

Now it is no longer a waiting game. Now it is a staying game. The news has broken worldwide, Muscat’s, Mizzi’s and Schembri’s names have been flashed across the globe in news reports and broadcasts even in countries as geographically and politically remote from Malta as Vietnam is. And those three are clearly not going anywhere. They are going to tough it out. Yesterday morning the Prime Minister told the press that “there is no rush” for him to take a decision about Mizzi and Schembri. That’s right – no rush. Two months have gone by since the news erupted, and still he’s saying there’s no rush. For the last three years we have heard Muscat say many times, repeatedly, that he’s a man who takes decisions, a man who is not afraid of decisions. And each time he said that, I got the distinct impression that the opposite is true, which is why he kept repeating it, to convince himself while trying to convince us. People who are decisive never make a point of saying that they are decisive. It is part of their nature and they take it for granted, like the fact that they have blue or brown eyes. His constant need to impress upon us that he is decisive – by telling us, rather than by showing us – put me in mind of those individuals who go out of their way to tell you how honest they are (because they are anything but). And now the big decision-making moment – if two months can be called a moment – has arrived and he won’t decide. Or rather, he can’t decide.

I have a pretty good idea why the Prime Minister is marking time, and I am sure you do too: he’s trying to work out how to keep us quiet while he keeps them on, while at the same time puzzling over how to pretend to let them go – in a scheme hatched in collusion with them – so that they in effect stay on in the background, doing exactly what they were doing before, this time in an unofficial capacity. Muscat is also trying to find a wayto break the news to us, if he has to pretend to let Mizzi go, that he is going to keep the health and energy portfolios himself, and also Project Malta, the catch-all contract-negotiating outfit of which Mizzi is currently in charge.

You will have noticed that despite the Prime Minister’s promise, several weeks ago now, that he would let us know “in a few days” the name of the “reputable international firm” that is supposed to be conducting “the international audit” on his minister’s financial affairs, there has been no such name. And journalists, oddly enough, have not bothered to keep asking for it. If this - I believe, fictitious - audit is really being conducted now, then there has to be a firm doing it and the firm has a name. But if there is no audit, there is no firm and no name.

The bottom line here is that we are being lied to all the time, brazenly and shamelessly, by the elected government. It is intolerable. Yet we tolerate it because Maltese society, despite its trappings of European materialism, hovers very close to the mentality of the Middle East.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com