The events of the last two weeks have been like a rollercoaster ride beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. From the calm and serenity of Easter week to the jaw-dropping revelation that allegedly exposed Egrant’s owner as the Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s wife, with much of the exposure explaining many things and sticking in people’s minds. Sticking because it fits in with many things in the past, such as why no action was ever really taken by the Prime Minister against his chief of staff Keith Schembri, and Minister Konrad Mizzi, who both opened a Panama account with intended deposits of millions of money a year, potentially laundered money with implied tax evasion intentions. It also explains why the Prime Minister never forced Keith Schembri to appear before the EP’s PANA committee investigating the word-wide graft exposure. It explains changes in the Maltese Parliament’s rules of ethics leading to the lack of need to declare a wife’s assets. It explains the many trips to Azerbaijan and Dubai!
Other revelations showed that both Brian Tonna, the Prime Minister’s consultant, and Keith Schembri, his right hand man, both have accounts in these banks. We were told that the Prime Minister’s wife received payments in her other accounts from the daughter of Azerbaijan’s president. We were also told that Keith Schembri was receiving kickbacks on the sale of Maltese passports to foreigners. Everyone was utterly flabbergasted except for the blind who did not wish to see!
We were also told that a magisterial enquiry was called after the evidence got away, but which produced three witnesses anyway, some with further information coming from other whistleblowers. We learn that the government’s own anti-graft investigative unit, the FIAU, had revealed a year earlier that kickbacks to Keith Schembri had been flagged with no action being taken by the Police or the Attorney General who both evidently knew about the report! Hey, this is not North Korea; it is the Presidency of the European Union Council of Ministers called Malta.
In the meantime, all we hear from the Prime Minister and his three musketeers is one denial after the other, which is not surprising, considering they are all facing fraud charges and possible prison sentences. There is an aggressive attack on the credentials of the whistle-blower which they are legally supposed to protect. There is the sudden resignation of the Labour Party’s whip who had seen enough to be able to come to his own logical conclusion. All of a sudden, a general election is called a year before its time!
In medicine and philosophy there is a maxim we use call Ockham’s razor. It says that “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate”, the simplest explanation out of several possible explanations is the more likely one. In this case, no one needs a university degree to conclude the more likely explanation. The likelihood is that we are being led by the nose by a bunch of crooks. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, he uses a maxim also useful in this case. "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." There are lots of impossibilities in this case which show that many people knew what was happening. loads of For example, the copied same mistake (Rabat instead of Attard) for the place of birth of the Prime Minister’s wife showing up in the Egrant declaration of trust, which shows the likelihood that her ID card must have been used by someone with access to it to open the alleged Egrant account in Panama. I have a well-founded moral conviction that we are all being led by a bunch of crooks who betrayed our trust and our country to feather their beds as quickly as possible.
The election explains much. It is a convenient smokescreen and a possible life buoy to save their skins by reconfirming them in government. However, this issue will not go away. If it is not the end, it surely is the end of the beginning of the end!
Some people surprise me when they declare it is expected that politicians cream off something while at the top. Please spare my incredulity for such declarations which insult hundreds of good men and women in politics who have made big sacrifices to see their country move forward. Others state that as long as they are making money, they do not mind what the ones at the top do. Worst case reasoning this, as when things start to go wrong economically, as they often do in these circumstances, nobody will come to their defence and save them as their ship sinks with the rest of the country. However, the most important issue is not that. Aristotle has showed us that man cannot be happy with power or money but only if he/she seeks to do what is right, to be virtuous. We owe it to ourselves to be virtuous and just to create a society which is also virtuous and just, which ensures our fulfilment in life and that of our children. We also owe it to the memory of those who have come before us and have showed us what is good or bad. Grandparents, parents, educators, counsellors who too have made sacrifices for us for what is essentially the common good. We owe it to ourselves and to all these people to keep this in mind when we go to vote on 3 June. We can create our own living hell or our own living heaven!
With all due respect to the memory of Nicholas Monsarrat, the sequel to the book he wrote which bears the physical and metaphorical title of this current piece, is “Richer than all his Tribe”. We all have to make a choice what our priorities in life are, whether it is the love of money with all the vice that this brings with it, or the realm of legal order, virtue and the common good! The Kingdom of God lies within you!
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