The PANA hearings continue to confirm the surreal situation in which this country finds itself. The closest protagonists of the Prime Minister have again exposed the severe uneasiness they feel as soon as the word Panama is uttered.
The comedy of errors that has been billed Panamagate continued to develop with Brian Tonna’s Sunday morning statement in which he confirmed that the much maligned offshore company Egrant was his and nobody else’s. The statement in itself was clearly not a good idea in the first place. The ensuing question was blatantly obvious. If the company were owned by Tonna all along, why would he have withheld such information all this time, given the outcry that has persisted for over a year now?
Right on cue, Muscat raised the issue during the usual Sunday rendition to the faithful in Rabat. In an evident damage limitation exercise, the Prime Minister answered the question by cheekily stating he had only now realised that this farce had real and serious consequences! Given this sudden realisation, he felt that it was now pressing that Tonna reveals his ownership of Egrant for the delectation of the gullible masses!
But that was not all, as we were also regaled with a ‘certificate’ of ownership confirming Tonna as sole owner of this company. This was penned by some colourful South American character called Riccardo Samaniego who at the moment is representing a company that is in the midst of a criminal investigation for fraud, money laundering and other upstanding efforts in tax evasion.
These series of events were followed by the shenanigans staged on Monday at the PANA hearings. In a show of utter disrespect to the European Parliament mandate which the PANA committee was acting on, Minister Mizzi made a feeble show, while others did not. Keith Schembri’s apologies were, incredibly, delivered to the Committee chairperson while walking down Republic Street in Valletta!
For all Castille’s efforts to undermine the seriousness of the facts uncovered by the Panama Papers leak, it is evident that this story is not going away any time soon. It is clear that the Prime Minister had estimated that time would brush the facts away and that Panama would fade away, as have so many of his broken promises, into the collective forgetfulness that he mistakenly believes remains his strongest ally. The crowd present last Sunday afternoon in Valletta should be an eye-opener to Muscat that Panama is not going anywhere, anytime soon.
This administration is on its back foot and will remain politically weak until the Panama issue is finally addressed by the Prime Minister. People on both sides of the political spectrum persistently ask one question. Why is Muscat adamant in defending the indefensible when it comes to Panamagate? Why is Muscat staking his reputation and his chances at the next general election by shielding Mizzi and Schembri given the political damage that is being inflicted on his party? Why give all this political mileage to his adversaries when two simple resignations can put a stop to all this?
Maybe the answer is in a definition of the word Kleptocracy that I found a couple of days ago. Kleptocracy – a government with corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. Typically, this system involves the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretence of honest service.
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Ms Galea is a PN General Election candidate on the Fourth District