After some six months since the Panama data dump, the long knives in Malta are still out, and endlessly sharpened, in an unrelenting quest to claim as trophies the scalps of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

One tends to overlook that Malta has an enlightened electorate that, at its moment of truth, made its wisest choice in years in giving us a political leadership steeped in the most commendable principles that has driven us to levels never experienced before.

The Mrieħel and the Townsquare projects are but puny aspirants to such lofty ideals.

Not to betray these principles, the front-line, no-nonsense defender against those scalps becoming political trophies has laid his fortunes on the line taking a storm of flak yet standing his ground with the most enviable aplomb.

Among those 11.5 million documents that caused the planet to wobble, we are told that the Russian leader has some $2 billion dollars stashed away for a Siberian polar day out of reach of his country’s taxman. And hardly a Russian voice of dissent (out of some 140 million natives) has been raised.

Yet, here in Malta, two of our leading lights have been vilified for putting away for safekeeping what really amounts to loose change. A yearly amount of loose change that will take each of the men 2,000 years to come anywhere near to what Putin has siphoned off out of his country.

What gives nihilists the right to hold these family men (from humble, yet, proud working-class background) to higher standards than the Russian people hold their leader?

If anything, it is Putin who should be held to higher standards, for, unlike Mizzi and Schembri, the buck (OK, two billion of it) stops with him as the country’s leader.

Two weights, two measures, like never before.

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