As I listened to most of the 13-hour debate on the no-confidence motion last Monday, the one speech which had me silently cheering my head off was the one that did not get a single clap in the House – that by Marlene Farrugia.

I can understand why the Labour MPs did not cheer her, but the fact that the Opposition MPs stood silent is one of the many mistakes that the Opposition has been making.

Here was one who tore the government to pieces, doing it far better than most PN MPs, who noticed things others had barely registered – like how she and Joe Mizzi were silently sidelined before the election although they were the party’s spokespeople on energy because the top levels already had their plans ready. No wonder they kicked out Ms Farrugia’s man, Godfrey Farrugia, on a trumped-up charge of tents outside Mater Dei. No wonder the incongruous marriage between the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Health. The end always justifies the means.

Yet, even Dr Godfrey Farrugia voted against the motion. Inexplicably. As did Evarist Bartolo, who had urged Konrad Mizzi to resign.

What was decidedly weird was how not one of the speakers on the government side referred to the Panama Papers in the whole 10-hour debate. They all spoke about what they had been doing over the past three years. As if that was the subject. Or else they spoke of the PN’s Cedoli initiative. Again, as if that was the subject, although I agree it merits discussion.

Equally weird was the repeated attack by Evarist Bartolo on the MFSA head, Professor Joe Bannister. He was roundly attacked for it by other speakers such as Jose Herrera, who spoke immediately afterwards and listed all the good works that the MFSA is doing, and even more by Charles Mangion in an undisguised attack on Bartolo. Nevertheless, Bartolo repeated the attack just days later. Those who have followed his political career through the years know he is, above all, a strategist. There must be a reason for this, which will become clear later on.

There is a link - there must be a link - between this attack, at this particular time, and the Panama Papers issue. The MFSA is directly involved in the Panama Papers case, although by default, because no action has been taken against a man, a minister at that, who has opened a company or a trust in an insecure jurisdiction. Evarist Bartolo is right to ask how the MFSA head could investigate Konrad Mizzi if he (Bannister) has a trust elsewhere. So Bartolo is implying dereliction of duty by the MFSA head, who has replied on the trust issue but not on what he should be doing or not doing.

Bannister’s head, if we may call him that, is Finance Minister Edward Scicluna, who is on record as having said that the Prime Minister must solve this matter, but who should have been giving clear instructions to the MFSA how to act on this matter. Edward Scicluna, as I learned when I questioned the Minister on an unrelated subject, relies very much on Bannister.

So Bartolo’s attack on Bannister is an attack on Edward Scicluna at a time when the government is under siege. Yet, just as much as the Labour MPs who spoke in the no-confidence debate did not address the real issue, so too the two who spoke defended Bannister and the MFSA but did not attack Bartolo. Issues just slip by.

One wonders what other ministers are telling our ministers when they meet at Council meetings. I ask this especially with regard to Minister Scicluna, who attended Ecofin in Amsterdam these past days about improving the automatic exchange of tax information. Even more to the point, Edward Scicluna proceeded to attend the PES meeting for ministers from socialist governments, held in Amsterdam as well, where the ministers “committed to continue fighting for the closing down of tax havens.”

I ask, but do not expect any answer: is it possible the Minister was not taken aside by one or more of his colleagues and asked what is happening in Malta and why the government has not taken any concrete and appropriate action?

The huge satisfaction expressed by the government side after the vote was palpable, not that it was ever in doubt. It showed, if anything, relief that the debate was over and that the issue could now be buried. That is where they are all wrong. The issue is so huge it cannot be buried, especially as long as the Prime Minister does not do what is expected of him.

On Sunday morning, The Sunday Times said in its editorial that the PN should have moved a noconfidence motion against Konrad Mizzi, not against the whole government. Simon Busuttil spent the better part of that morning’s crowded meeting taħt it-tinda at Fortizza, Sliema, to answer that.

That may have been the beginning of a softening of the PN stance, which became all the more visible the next day after the long 10-hour debate. Could it be, I asked myself later, because of the brash revelation by Chris Cardona that there exists a recording of the PN chief saying he plans to remove his two deputies?

The issue cannot die, must not be allowed to die out. To understand the entire timeline and the various ramifications of the case, see the excellent documentary by NET (available on Facebook, on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog and elsewhere).

The issue will be kept alive not by any PN grand gestures, such as other demos, or more motions in the House, not even by more revelations than what we already have, but by its own innate dynamism: Malta promotes its own financial services and here is a minister who boldly invests elsewhere. We have some 100,000 at the level of poverty and yet we have ministers and assistants rich enough to behave like Russian oligarchs. But then again, this in-your-face government boasts of having reduced the energy bills when if the previous government’s policy were to be followed, the price of fuel would decline immensely and would be far cheaper than what it is today, which is at one of the EU’s highest levels.

This government keeps repeating the same mantra – that the economy was in tatters when it was elected to office, when according to the Central Bank itself (see the front page of The Malta Business Weekly for confirmation) it was the high rise of services in the years from 2004 to 2014, the highest in all the EU countries, which saved Malta from the crisis. Economy in crisis sabieħ!

One must pay careful attention, in my opinion, to Konrad Mizzi’s preferred mode of action. Let’s assume he is right to say he found Enemalta in a mess. But then, instead of doing deep surgery, he promptly sold off one-third of it. He found the BWSC plant which was delivering huge efficiencies and he promptly sold it off. To assuage our fears, he boasted he was replacing Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) with gas, even risking an LNG ship inside the Marsaxlokk harbor, at least temporarily.