Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

A week into Malta’s European presidency, no one here is holding his breath to see if someone (anyone!) in Brussels gasps at the effrontery of Konrad Mizzi swanning around and chairing European energy meetings. But why should anyone suck air in Brussels when we ourselves are content to sip the waters of forgetfulness?

Mizzi was discovered to have opened a Panama company almost at the same time as becoming a government minister, with his accountant assuring banks he’d deposit vast annual sums of money he didn’t yet have and couldn’t possibly legally earn while minister. In any other real democracy, a minister caught doing that would be called “the disgraced minister” in the press (actually, the disgraced former minister, as he’d have been sacked instantly).

Yet, here, almost a year into the Panama scandal, Mizzi is still de facto energy minister,is still in charge of Projects Malta, and still hasn’t even closed down his Panama company. (The latter, no doubt, with the excuse to permit a thorough audit of his affairs, even though Panama doesn’t cooperate with such investigations.)

If we shrink at calling him disgraced, we can at least recognise that, since the scandal first broke, his behaviour has been disgraceful.

He claims to have answered all questions fully. Actually, at every stage of the revelations he gave evasive answers and refused to apologise for his behaviour in all but the most perfunctory manner.

The Gang of Three have been greatly helped by the forgetfulness of the press. Keith Schembri’s own Panama company has largely faded from view, never having been in the foreground. It is true that mention of Mizzi is often accompanied by a reference to the Panama Papers; but what is usually summed up is the state of affairs that those papers revealed. Rarely is any mention made of how what Mizzi and Joseph Muscat told us, in the early stages, didn’t tally with what we actually found out.

With hindsight, given what we know now, we should be gasping at the nerve of those two. Consider what they said at different points in time.

On February 8 (according to Mizzi), the minister filled in his parliamentary declaration of assets – on a day when he travelled to Dubai with Muscat for a summit. In that declaration he filled in the name of his company, Hearnville.

A mere two weeks later, on February 25, as newly crowned deputy leader, Mizzi was asked the name of the company, which hadn’t yet emerged.

He said he couldn’t remember. He said it was “something technical”. (Hearnville?)

Rarely is any mention made of how what Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat told us, in the early stages, didn’t tally with what we actually found out

On February 26, the Prime Minister says he saw that declaration around three weeks earlier (which would be almost a working week before Mizzi was supposed to have filled in the form). He saw nothing wrong with having a Panama company as long as the minister had declared it.

In fact, he condemned the news broken by Daphne Caruana Galizia as an attempt to interfere with the deputy leader election process, and he praised the delegates for not having been fooled by it.

Months later, without batting an eyelid, he’d say setting up a Panama company was deserving of public anger. Although he had earlier praised Labour delegates for electing Mizzi, now he thought the minister’s behaviour warranted resignation from the deputy leadership. He also supposedly stripped Mizzi of his health and energy portfolios (although we now know that that was just word play).

Muscat never said that his initial judgement on the Panama company was mistaken. Nor has he said that Mizzi at any point ever deceived him. Which is interesting, given that the reason the Prime Minister gave for Mizzi having the company didn’t match the facts.

On February 26, Muscat said the company was set up to manage assets abroad. The parliamentary declaration (which Muscat himself said he’d seen in early February) made no mention of any assets that warranted a Panama company.

So what assets abroad was Muscat referring to? Was he ever told – prior to reading about it in the Panama Papers – that Mizzi’s accountant was seeking to open bank accounts in receipt of income deriving from sources that had nothing to do with Mizzi’s past earnings or future legitimate earnings as minister?

Muscat was never made to answer this question. If he was told about the attempt to open bank accounts (with huge annual deposits) in early February (when he says he first learned of the Panama company), it means he saw nothing wrong with it – Mizzi clearly had his endorsement to become deputy leader. If he was told afterwards, it’s astonishing that he still saw nothing wrong with having had such information withheld from him.

Meanwhile, Mizzi was giving a whole raft of reasons, flitting from one to another.

He did it for the family. (No one retorted that so did Don Michael Corleone.)

He did it to avoid conflicts of interest. Remember that? Of course, not, it was quickly dropped when it became untenable but it was the crowning explanation for a while.

He did it with his post-ministerial career in mind. Apparently forgetting – but, then, so did most of us – that he had told us he had signed up for a 10-year project to reform Malta, and was eager to be on the front line during the 2018 general election.

In other words, he told us that he opened a company in 2013 so that he could use it 10 years later, in 2023. That should have been a headline. He wasn’t even asked if he was seriously asking us to believe that.

The Panama Papers finally revealed the number of times his accountant tried to get a bank account opened and how many foreign banks politely said he just might be a crook. At roughly that point, Mizzi stopped answering questions on the pretence that he had answered all of them already.

Then, thanks in part to his fake demotion, he disappeared from view, only to turn up now during the European presidency. The Prime Minister, far from having punished him, turns out to have shielded him throughout.

It isn’t just Mizzi’s involvement in the Panama Papers that should be recalled in the press. It’s also his evasions and misleading answers.

They are half the story. It is pointless expecting the European institutions and the press to be shocked at his appearances when they don’t know half of it.

There’s a word for Mizzi’s behaviour then and now: disgraceful. And there’s a word for anyone who shields it: shameful. They’re words we should repeatedly use and explain if we want others to take them up.

ranierfsadni@europe.com