This article is for those who don’t believe the Prime Minister would lie to the nation so brazenly or that a blogger could go so far…
This island is deeply divided. A plague is on both our houses.
After living with the elephant in the room of Egrant, the Prime Minister and his wife now find themselves in a kangaroo court.
Some would say it has been convened by ‘dirty tricks’. The revelations linking Michelle Muscat to the third Panamanian company Egrant are, arguably, the Nationalist Party’s last chance to put Labour out of the running at the next election. With the original Panama off the boil and the polls stacked heavily in Muscat’s favour, something had to be done to disgrace him. And when better than during the EU presidency?
His supporters stand shoulder to shoulder. As far as they’re concerned, Daphne Caruana Galizia is orchestrating lies and playing a frightening and cruel game. Her credentials precede her – a deep hatred of all things Labour and a widely known inability to critique Maltese public life impartially. In her world of smoke and mirrors, she points the finger and incriminates. Recently she wrote that those who work for the PL media should be “flushed down the lavatory where they belong” What kind of political discourse is that?
There are those who believe she is telling the truth and that her claims should be taken at face value: the Muscats are guilty enough as it is and asking for proof is beyond pathetic. They believe Caruana Galizia possesses sufficient documentary evidence that proves Muscat is the ultimate beneficial owner of Egrant. Caruana Galizia should not have to reveal it. After all, wasn’t she right about Panama first time round?
And there are people, like me, who are prepared to entertain reasonable doubt. People for whom ‘guilty enough’ is not enough in such matters. Some want to believe that Muscat is telling the truth, but will change their mind in the face of compelling evidence; others want to believe Caruana Galizia, yet hesitate, believing that responsible journalism requires publication of the evidence. Anything less here would be a dereliction of duty both to the public and the nation, and deeply dangerous.
No one should be able to write a blog incriminating the Prime Minister (or the Leader of the Opposition) and expect an immediate police investigation, followed by a knee-jerk resignation
Caruana Galizia refuses to make public what she claims to possess: scanned copies of documents which, allegedly, until Thursday before last, were sitting inside a safe at Pilatus and have since disappeared. Safeguarding her “whistleblower”, she insists that it’s enough to infer the Muscats’ direct involvement from this. Can one even assume that this is a bona fide whistleblower and not a stooge or crank, paid (in the American gangster phrase) to 'sing like a canary’?
Caruana Galizia’s believers scent conspiracy behind the circumstantial evidence of the Pilatus CEO’s furtive departure from Whitehall Mansions with a suspicious-looking suitcase on that same Thursday night. He strenuously denies this construction (just as convincingly) and has submitted himself and his bank to a thorough investigation. Is this a man with nothing to hide or a man brazenly confident he has covered his tracks?
Many too are angry that the Commissioner of Police did not raid Pilatus as soon as the story broke (as if he is personally monitoring Caruana Galizia’s blog 24/7) and that it was left to the Prime Minister to do so. I won’t tell you how many times, sometimes in tears, I have called the police only to be told that reports can’t be made over the telephone.
The following comment I came across strikes a chord: “Are we really suggesting that on the basis of unsubstantiated claims made by a blogger, the police should storm into a bank without a warrant, accessing people’s private financial records? Is that what Malta has become? A blogger’s banana republic?”
Many will disagree. But I’d argue that no one should be able to write a blog incriminating the Prime Minister (or the Leader of the Opposition) and expect an immediate police investigation, followed by a knee-jerk resignation. By the same logic, Simon Busuttil should also step down pending a magisterial inquiry into the fake DB invoices.
There has to be due process. Saying that Caruana Galizia should be believed because the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and one of his ministers held companies in Panama is a profoundly disturbing short-circuiting of the law. Firstly, this is not ‘nail-two-get-one-free’. Secondly, the sharp end of the work on the Panama Papers was not down to her. She merely went public with the story here.
But there’s still the gnawing question why Caruana Galizia chose to go public with such sensitive information when there was the possibility that evidence could be tampered with and when she could have gone to the police or the magistrate herself and still not blown the whistle; unless, of course, the appearance of such tampering was all part of the plan? Such is conspiracy theory. And if we’re going down that route, perhaps she knew all about the CEO’s comings and goings and that flight to Baku and chose her day very deliberately.
And why would someone who claims to be in possession of evidence refuse to cooperate with a magisterial inquiry now? Unless truth and justice are of no real concern, perception being everything in politics, and ‘enough’ damage having already been done.
It’s conceivable that Caruana Galizia wants to drag things out for as long as possible. Every ‘extra day’ exposes Muscat to her toxicity and inflames the people. Maybe – and this is the chilling thing – she is holding back to drop her bombshell closer to the election.
The game goes on, the players calling each other’s bluff… until when?
‘When’ has got to be when the circumstantial evidence gives way – if it ever does – to promised fanfare of direct evidence. Meanwhile, can we please stop talking about disappearing documents, flights to Baku, shredders and suitcases? And can we please stop arguing that the evidence is the evidence that was taken away, which proves the existence of the evidence that is not evident because it was taken away.
For the moment, therefore, I’m suspending judgement. Later, it’s prison for either one or the other, or the whistleblower.
michelaspiteri@gmail.com