As soon as the details of the second release of the Panama Papers were released on Monday evening,  gleeful government scriptwriters were all over the social media listing the known PN members or sympathisers who were mentioned in the Papers.

They were joined in their glee by Orizzont, for instance, which boasted that the Panama Papers issue had exploded in the PN hands.

For a time, one must admit, these claims seemed to checkmate the long PN and civil society attacks on the government with regards to Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

But then the night passed and a new day dawned and things could be seen better and in their proper perspective.

The Panama Papers are such a massive treasure trove of documents regarding many countries from all over the world that one finds it quite difficult to find one’s way around

And then, at least for those of us who are not into investments, funds, trusts, etc, this world is all alien, its terms incomprehensible, its logic abstruse.

And this is as regards legal investments. Where it regards, on the other hand, shady investments, that is an even deeper mystery where normally one would require someone else to guide him and show him the ropes, explain to him which jurisdictions are soft ones and which have draconian rules.

In such circumstances, and we are still skimming over the facts here, one can readily understand how the public at large can be bamboozled and tricked and led to confuse one thing with another. The people in general are out of their depth here and can be tricked and led astray.

There are financial intermediaries whose job and profession is to help the clients maximize the return on their investments. Of course, the intermediaries can guide the clients one way or another (and they may indeed lead them where the intermediaries make the best profits). But at the end, it is the clients who decide.

Obviously, there are intermediaries and intermediaries. Some would persuade the clients towards eg Panama, the British Virgin Islands, etc and there would also be intermediaries who on principle do not touch such jurisdictions. One has here the tendency to judge internally one intermediary from another.

The fact, however, that the name of an intermediary is mentioned in public among the Panama Papers is not, in itself, to impute guilt on that intermediary. This point is made by the Papers themselves who warn that investing eg in Panama is not a criminal act in itself.

The names that were mentioned are names of people who are well-known, and respected, in Malta, professionals and worthy members of the financial services sector. Just for being mentioned is no cause for them to be ashamed of.

If however it is proved that they, or others, have allowed, or even facilitated, illegal methods then yes those professionals must be criticized and even punished. But so far, the names which so excited some people at Castille on Monday, have not been reported to have done anything illegal.

Obviously, any reader will readily understand that the real reason for this gleeful spin is to take the heat off Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri. This is yet another level of the issue – that of Politically Exposed Persons. There is no doubt that Dr Mizzi and Mr Schembri are PEPs and equally from the other names mentioned only former PN minister Ninu Zammit qualifies as a PEP – and in fact, when his name came up in the Swiss Leaks, he was promptly sacked by his party leader.

He rest of the people mentioned on Monday either are not PEPs or else they did not feature among the people who invested in Panama.

The suspicion is clear: the aim of Monday night’s exercise was to stir the waters and help cloud away what Dr Mizzi and Mr Schembri did. It is a shame the government did that and tried to get people to equate one side with the other.

It is precisely this that the government continually tries to do and it just shows how it knows it is at fault.