Joseph Muscat has of late been giving reporters the slip. Quite obviously, this is not pre-election 2013 when he was courting them as he needed to put his message across to the non-committed. Be that as it may, however, reporters’ insistence for information about the audit of Cabinet minister Konrad Mizzi’s secret company in secretive Panama is a non-starter.

The audit was a ruse, used by Muscat when cornered earlier this year on the discovery that his minister and chief of staff, Keith Schembri, had opened secret companies in Panama a few days after the 2013 election. The audit was merely a ploy to gain time until a strategy was found of how to limit the damage that the Panamagate scandal had on Muscat’s government.

The fundamental issue here is that a minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff were caught out having opened a secret company in Panama, not forgetting the third secret company, Egrant Limited, also opened in Panama. This only a few days after the 2013 election. That is the real issue at hand.

Since neither Mizzi nor Schembri resigned from their posts, nor were they made to step down by Muscat, that should be the fundamental question that needs to be asked over and over again and not when the elusive audit will be published.

Audits of complex multinational companies take less time to be completed than that infamous elusive audit of a secret company with a bank account of €92.  There are two possible scenarios to this: that the audit does not exist and/or it was completed along the instructions given by the government, with Muscat waiting for the best time when to make it public, possibly close to the election to ensure there will not be enough time to discuss it properly.