Here’s a question for the Prime Minister. As a former journalist, Joseph Muscat will appreciate what an achievement it is to win the Pulitzer Prize. Is he going to congratulate Matthew Caruana Galizia, a member of the International Consortium of International Journalists (ICIJ), for being part of the winning team that on Monday won this year’s Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting?

The ICIJ won, of course, because of its work on the Panama Papers.

It sounds at first like a gotcha question, the kind you ask with only entertainment in mind: to enjoy watching someone squirm in the limelight. But the question couldn’t be more serious.

Think of this: the Prime Minister has met, and been photographed with, the very young Maltese winner of the junior edition of the Eurovision song contest. No international achievement by a Maltese passes notice here. It is sometimes embarrassing to see politicians line up to congratulate also-rans.

So what should we do when a Maltese is a core staff member of the ICIJ, which has just won the prize that sets the global gold standard for journalism as a profession?

On Monday, the New York Times was boasting about adding three Pulitzers to its showcase. Distinguished journalists continue to live off their individual wins for decades.

But if Muscat says anything about this Pulitzer, it can only be cynical. Anything complimentary will run up against what his men have said.

For Konrad Mizzi, the Panama Papers are fake news as far as he is concerned.

For Keith Schembri, Caruana Galizia’s involvement was itself a sign of a malicious conspiracy. The reporting by Neil Chenoweth, a multiple award-winning Australian financial journalist, was full of mistakes and confusions. Not Pulitzer material, you’ll gather.

On the blog run by Muscat’s communications aide, Glenn Bedingfield, one post (April 4, 2016) said: “I was very amused to realise that Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son was involved in this ‘groundbreaking scoop’...”

In that same period, l-Orizzont  found it noteworthy that Matthew Caruana Galizia and Chenoweth had worked together in 2014, clearly hinting that the link busted Chenoweth’s credibility.

Alas, it seems that that edition of the General Workers’ Union newspaper escaped the Pulitzer jury’s notice. Otherwise, who knows, the jury might have held back on commending the ICIJ: “For the Panama Papers, a series of stories using a collaboration of more than 300 reporters on six continents to expose the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens.”

But back to Bedingfield, as he wasn’t done. On April 8, 2016, he returned to the involvement of Matthew Caruana Galizia to suggest that the Panama Papers team, under his influence, may have deliberately left out certain Maltese names of Nationalist persuasion.

If Muscat says anything about this Pulitzer, it can only be cynical. Anything complimentary will run up against what his men have said

This ‘possibility’ (which the Labour machine has since dropped) goes beyond implying that one journalist, Chenoweth, may have been misled. It raises the prospect of the entire ICIJ being corrupted – leaving out names they knew for partisan reasons. This despite being led by editors known to work without fear or favour.

On April 13, Bedingfield returned to the Chenoweth-Caruana Galizia link. He said it was surpassingly strange that an Australian financial journalist should be so interested in Keith Schembri, particularly when (Bedingfield claimed) the ICIJ hadn’t seen fit to list Schembri.

Bedingfield went on. Given that Chenoweth was “confusing” and “obscuring” the facts, this suggested the influence of someone intent on harming Schembri and the Labour government. “One cannot but note that Matthew Caruana Galizia, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son, works at the ICIJ.”

One year on, we know that nothing Chenoweth wrote was disproved. Nor did he retract anything. Although Schembri let it be known that he had engaged an Australian law firm to protect his reputation, to my knowledge he has never taken any legal action.

Confusion and obscurity, however, abound in the statements by Bedingfield and Schembri. The ICIJ did not leave Schembri out; Chenoweth is part of the ICIJ.

Besides, there is nothing mysterious in an Australian journalist taking an interest in two Maltese involved in the Panama Papers. So did New Zealand politicians. The case was used to show the laxity of New Zealand’s financial services, where Schembri and Mizzi each set up a trust.

But there is a broader issue, at the core of Chenoweth’s career in forensic business journalism. The entire point of the investigation was to expose the global nature of the infrastructure of money laundering. What could make the point better than that two politicians from a small island on the other side of the globe could turn up in a list of names featuring known scoundrels and money launderers? All serviced by the same lot of helpful financial servants.

Even from a purely Maltese-interest angle, this is the real large question raised by the Panama Papers. The narrower issue is whether Mizzi and Schembri acted with the criminal intent of enriching themselves at our expense. The larger one is whether our system of government has been penetrated by global criminal networks.

Neither issue should be raised lightly. They are both open questions, which require investigation by the police and other authorities. The ICIJ has the merit of having raised such issues with all the gravity and responsibility they deserve. Hence the Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting.

In contrast, the government spin machine has sought to portray the issue like a tinpot dictatorship, where the journalists’ explanations are an international conspiracy against the government.

A year into the Panama Papers, we can better see the price Malta is paying.

It’s not just the damage to our financial services industry. Nor is it covered by the damage inflicted, on the country’s reputation as a whole, when a cabinet minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff are widely assumed, internationally, to have attempted money laundering while retaining the Prime Minister’s full support.

We must also factor in the corruption of our public culture. A Maltese journalist is part of an international team that wins the Pulitzer, working on a project that garners worldwide praise. But here in Malta the government uses its machine to attack that same project as malicious and blames the Maltese journalist.

This is what we have come to. To protect Schembri and Mizzi, Muscat wants us to think the Pulitzer is undeserved, that the doyens of journalism came to a mistaken judgement, and that prize-winning journalists let themselves be fooled or corrupted by its Maltese member.

More precisely, Muscat expects us to let his government talk as though that’s a legitimate interpretation. We aren’t really expected to believe it but we really are expected not to disrupt our political theatre, where the normal rules of democracy – evidence, transparency, accountability – are suspended. So much for cosmopolitan Malta.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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