The Prime Minister has been forced to break his silence about his chief of staff. He hasn’t imparted any information, but he has been forced to admit that there is a story here, which people are talking about, that Schembri hasn’t been going in to the office, and that he is “receiving treatment” for an unspecified malady.

He was cornered yesterday by a journalist working for this newspaper, at a publicity event for Crane Currency, the US banknote-printer which will be setting up in Malta eventually, but they hope before the general election. Because of the occasion, the question was inevitable and the Prime Minister should have been prepared for it. The last time Keith Schembri was seen in public with him was at a Crane Currency press conference last September, two and a half months ago, and he made a point of praising Schembri as being instrumental in brokering the arrangements. Then there was a bit of a fuss when I discovered that Kasco, the chief of staff’s business, is the Malta representative for the currency printing machines favoured by Crane Currency, but right now that’s a side detail. At some point after that press conference, where Schembri was so conspicuous, I began to notice that he wasn’t present at any of the Prime Minister’s big events, including the much-filmed visit to Malta by the Dutch and Slovak prime ministers, and that he wasn’t travelling with him either. I asked around, but nobody seemed quite sure as Schembri likes to be invisible most times and operate in the shadows, then I got the information I needed. Schembri is seriously ill. He has been out of the office quite a while. Ever since I reported that, members of the government and those who work for them have been keen to spread the rumour – but never go on the record – that it’s a lie. Schembri himself, however, has not issued a statement.

If somebody wrote a newspaper story about me – if I were a high government official – saying that I am terminally ill with cancer of the XYZ, and it was untrue, I would sit down, compose and issue a denial, setting the record straight, within five minutes of reading it. That is the normal course of behaviour by somebody who is “lied about”, but it hasn’t happened in this case and that’s the crucial piece of information that people should be looking at. In fact, when Keith Schembri had his lawyers write to the Data Protection Commissioner to instruct me to take down the relevant blog-posts, he argued on grounds of privacy and not on grounds of untruth or incorrect facts, which would have given him a far stronger basis.

Journalists would have expected Schembri, who the Prime Minister so celebrated in respect of Crane Currency, to be at yesterday’s big press event, given that it was all supposed to be his doing (not true, but we’ll let that go for now). And when he wasn’t, even those who doggedly doubted my reports of his serious illness would have said, “Hmmmm.”

But the Prime Minister was not prepared for the question from The Malta Independent, and got out of answering the question by saying that he expects an apology first, and a retraction of the story which was published in the Opposition newspaper last Sunday. The Times of Malta appears to be under orders not to touch the subject, even now that Adrian Hillman, Schembri’s stooge at that newspaper, is out of the way. This is unfortunate, because it is a big news story and once it is out there and people are talking about it, no newspaper can afford to decide that it isn’t news, or that it can ignore the story.

Muscat became extremely defensive and hostile, exhibiting body language, facial expressions and retort-patterns more usually associated with a recalcitrant teenager summoned before the headmaster about a spot of bother in the changing-rooms. Keith Schembri is “alive and kicking”, he said, when nobody had even suggested that he is dead. He will be returning to the office “very, very soon”, he said, without saying exactly how long he has been away from his desk. He is “receiving treatment”, the Prime Minister said, without saying what kind of treatment, or why that treatment should be keeping him away from work for so long. But the treatment is not for the illness “which certain sections of the media have said it is”, calling reports of Schembri’s terminal cancer “fake news” (the latest buzzword), but failing conspicuously to say what it is (and again, not being challenged by journalists to do so).

The Prime Minister has lied to the public before and he will lie again. This is nothing new. He is still lying about the fictitious “audit” into his pet minister’s business affairs. When I reported that his chief of staff and that pet minister have secret companies in Panama, sheltered by trusts in New Zealand, which they set up in concert, they said I was lying, too. They spread rumours about me and plastered those rumours on the front pages of the newspapers friendly to them. Then the story broke across the world and they had to stop accusing me of lying. Instead, they went into major defence mode and that’s the position they still hold. Don’t expect the truth from the Prime Minister. He can’t afford to speak it. There are probably deals those three have done behind everybody’s back, including the backs of their colleagues in the cabinet, with individuals in less democratic lands from whom Schembri’s very serious illness must be concealed, as he would be a crucial part of that deal.

I think that’s the real reason why they have tried so hard to hide Schembri’s absence from the office and the nature of his illness. It’s not us from whom they wish to conceal it, but bigger movers and shakers in lands far from our own, the movers and shakers who are the source of the funds that should have been going into the bank accounts they have been struggling so hard to set up in connection with their Panama companies, and which are now proving impossible because their names and what they’re up to have been published round the world.

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