We all know what’s going to happen during the no-confidence vote on Monday. Every Labour MP will vote in favour of the Panamagate-stricken government. They’ve gone out of their way to make that much clear, not least those MPs who also made it clear that they find it indecent that Konrad Mizzi is leaving it up to the Prime Minister to ask him to go.
Rallying around Joseph Muscat in this way – given his role in stoking the Panamagate crisis with his prevarication – is easy to dismiss as tribal. But take it from me, I know a few dozen Libyan tribes very well and their settlements are oases of reason and wry political calculation. The Awlad Al-Labour are no exception.
Three calculations will be obvious to them – so obvious they’re probably simply intuited, not spelled out.
First, there is one lesson from the divisions that emerged out of the premature downfall of the last Labour government in 1998. The scars of that debacle were not just emotional – the gut-wrenching sight of political fratricide and parricide when Dom Mintoff voted against his own government.
The scars were also organisational. It took years for the divisions within the party to heal, for the self-destructive factionalism to be overcome. And the politicians who know this best, at first hand, are precisely those senior Labour figures – Evarist Bartolo, Leo Brincat, George Vella – who are said to have pressed for Mizzi’s resignation.
There is only one way in which a Labour MP can vote against his own government and not unleash such long-term divisions within the parliamentary group and party – and that is by having the entire group unite around a change of prime minister. But the unity isn’t there.
Second, it will take more than men and women ‘of good will’ to summon that unity. If Muscat is removed, how would the new leader be chosen? Selecting a leader from the new generation would require a leadership race since there is more than one pretender. But a leadership race would be divisive at a time when Labour least needs it.
So the putative new leader would need to be a consensus candidate, a representative of the older generation. But that would mean – given that Labour’s senior generation is not just older but, quite simply, old – that he would only be a stop-gap leader. The new government he’d lead would be riven by the jockeying for position between those who will want to succeed him in two or three years.
Third, getting a consensus will be impossible. Which current minister will vote for a new leader if his or her Cabinet post is not guaranteed? Which backbencher will settle for staying out and killing every hope of promotion during this legislature? There will be no remaining time for another Cabinet reshuffle before the next election.
The auditors cannot audit secrets. To establish Mizzi’s trustworthiness,they need to take him at his word
That, in a nutshell, is why every Labour MP, of good will or not, will vote for the government on Monday.
But doing the most rational thing doesn’t mean that it will leave the public satisfied with Muscat’s plan for shutting down Panamagate. Everything indicates that it won’t.
The plan so far seems to be this. Muscat will wait for the ‘audit report’ on Mizzi, which will tell us that Mizzi ‘did not lie’ and did nothing illegal, but Muscat will still ask for Mizzi’s resignation out of sensitivity to popular sentiment. Mizzi will resign. Far from being disgraced, he will then be hailed for his political virtue and honourable sense of public duty.
The problem with this plan is that it won’t shut Panamagate down. The auditors cannot audit secrets.
To establish Mizzi’s trustworthiness, they need to take him at his word that they have been given access to everything he owns. “We trust him because he gave us his word” is not a solid foundation for an audit report.
In addition, it seems the auditors have only been asked to establish whether Mizzi has millions in some bank account. That’s not enough to assure the public.
Mizzi’s claim that a Panama company was the most rational way of managing his declared assets has been scoffed at by several experts in wealth management.
One expert has gone so far as to say that the advice is so wrong (on the basis of Mizzi’s declared assets) that it constitutes malpractice.
Is that advice itself going to be subject to assessment in the Prime Minister’s promised audit report?
Next, the revealed exchange ofemails between Karl Cini (Nexia BT)and Mossack Fonseca’s Panama office raises fresh questions about Mizzi’s public assurances.
Cini requested companies in Panama just a few days after the 2013 general election. One of these companies was formally acquired by Mizzi in 2015, another by Keith Schembri that same year.
Both Mizzi and Schembri have denied that they were already the ultimate owners of a Panama company before 2015. But the published correspondence between Cini and Mossack Fonseca Panama suggests that, at the very least, the intent to own a Panama company was already there in 2013.
If that’s true, why was Mizzi already thinking of his post-political career (the reason he’s given us for owning a company in Panama) just after becominga minister?
If, on the other hand, it’s untrue that in 2013 Cini was writing on Mizzi’s behalf, will the audit report establish this? Or will we need to take Mizzi’s word for it?
Furthermore, Mizzi has disavowed that he ever knew about his financial advisor’s attempts to open a bank account on his behalf. But, in the published emails, Cini is shown chasing documents needed to open a bank account in Dubai. At one point, he asked about the documents as he needed to update his clients in a coming meeting.
That sounds like Mizzi knew of the attempts to open a bank account. Will the audit report establish whether that impression is true or mistaken?
Unless such questions are settled by Muscat’s promised audit report, Panamagate won’t go away, even with the resignation of Mizzi and Schembri.
Its legacy will be frustrated voters, angry that they’ve been treated like fools, and journalists tracking down every scent of scandal.
The Labour MPs know this as well. Some of them must be wondering whether it will be they who take the hit – from journalists looking more closely at their affairs, or, come election time, from voters – if Panamagate isn’t settled properly.
The confidence vote in their government won’t leave them feeling too confident about their political environment.