Deputy Leader Mario de Marco and Nationalist MP Francis Zammit Dimech this morning filed a motion in Parliament to request a revision of Speaker Anglu Farrugia’s ruling in relation to MPs right to censure the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Keith Schembri.

They also requested that a report be drawn up and registered in the Parliamentary minutes.

Independent MP Marlene Farrugia originally filed a censure motion against Mr Schembri himself; however this was amended to place the onus onto the Prime Minister. This was done after the Clerk of the House informed Dr Farrugia that the motion in its original form was not admissible.

The amended version reads that once a parliamentary committee has carried out investigations into Mr Schembri, the House would contemplate whether the Prime Minister should be censured based on his confidence in Mr Schembri. In addition to this, the amended version also orders the Prime Minister to demand Mr Schembri’s resignation if the House decides he should be censured.

In the Speaker’s ruling, Dr Anglu Farrugia said that Parliament has the right to censure ministers for the behaviour of their employees, not the employees themselves.

Opposition Leader Simon Busuttil took exception to this ruling, arguing that when Parliament had moved to censure Richard Cachia Caruana there were no objections to this effect.

“Since what took place in the House in this case resulted in a change of the nature of the original motion...without any valid reason which derives from the Parliamentary Standing Orders or from the Constitution of Malta,” the Opposition’s motion says.

“Consequently, the Parliament of Malta is not being allowed to offer a voice for what the population is demanding, the direct censure of Keith Schembri himself,” it continues.

Mr Schembri was found, together with no-portfolio Minister Konrad Mizzi to each hold a trust and a company in New Zealand and the financially secretive jurisdiction of Panama respectively.

The Malta Independent is an official partner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and gained full access to the entire set of Panama Papers documents. Documents have shown how Mr Schembri employed layers of secrecy through numerous offshore financial structures.