We thought he had admitted his mistake and apologised. But, apparently, he had more to say about it.

We are referring, of course, to Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi who, it seems, just doesn’t know when to give it a rest.

Azzopardi hit the headlines on Sunday after it was revealed that the Tumas Group had paid for his stay at the Tel Aviv Hilton in 2017. Initially, the MP had said that he had no recollection of ever receiving any freebies from the Tumas Group, but his memory came back the following day when he remembered that he had attended the wedding of a Rabbi’s daughter and had phoned Ray Fenech for help after he failed to find accommodation in the Israeli city.

The outspoken MP first insisted that he had done nothing wrong because, he said, he had repaid Fenech with a silver gift upon his return to Malta. He also argued that, at the time, Yorgen Fenech had not yet been outed as the owner of 17 Black, and certainly not as an alleged mastermind in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. He said that, through his work as a politician and as a lawyer representing the Caruana Galizia family, he has proven himself as a fighter of corruption.

The fact remains, however, that, as an MP, he had received a gift from a businessman. George Hyzler, the Standards Commissioner, said that repaying a gift does not necessarily cancel the original gift. The lawyer suspended himself from the PN’s parliamentary group pending and internal ethics investigation, and PN Leader Bernard Grech said in no unclear terms that when the party expects high standards, it must practice what it preaches.

And sections of the media reported yesterday that Azzopardi breached the code of ethics for MPs because he had neither declared the gift nor rejected it.

Azzopardi himself said on Tuesday evening that he had made a mistake and that he should have acted differently. In fact, he apologised over the case.

But less than 12 hours later, the MP was claiming on Facebook that the government had “invented” a story about him to divert attention away from the impending arrest and questioning of Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi by financial crimes police officers. 

On Tuesday evening it was an admission of a mistake and an apology. By Wednesday morning it had turned into an “invention.”

Now it might be the case that the story was leaked to the media to divert attention, as Azzopardi has claimed, but this certainly does not mean that the Tel Aviv story is fake. The hotel stay is a fact. The fact that a businessman paid for it is also a fact. There is nothing fake about this. So how Azzopardi can suddenly claim that this was an invented story is beyond us.

Some have argued that what Azzopardi did does not even compare to what people like Mizzi and Schembri are claimed to have done. That much is true. But one does not cancel out the other. The fact that the Panama duo were once again interrogated by police does not exculpate the MP from accepting a gift, possibly in breach of the MPs’ code of ethics.

The two cases are distinct from each other and Azzopardi, after having admitted a mistake and apologised for it, should wait for the outcome of the PN’s ethics probe before doing what he claims the government is doing, and try to divert attention away from his own actions.