Much was made last week of the new parish priest of Żebbuġ, Gozo, who swept into his pastoral role in a convertible Porsche drawn by the children of his village. A good story, except there was a better one: Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, in a stolen Ferrari, drawn by the Prime Minister and his various minions.
It’s that bad, there’s no two ways about it. 17 Black is a case of outright and brazen kleptocracy, and no amount of Italianate legalese by Robert Musumeci can take away an ounce of the responsibility the Prime Minister has chosen to make his own.
So crystal-clear and damning are the facts that the ‘neutral’ (read ‘spineless’, ‘plain stupid’, or both) commentators who mutter on about the ‘political class’ to argue that there’s no getting to the bottom of this, are guilty of complicity.
There is no generic political class here, just two individuals and a third who supports them. There’s no murkiness, just a limpid tale of corruption at the highest level of government.
Nor is there much in common with the Egrant matter, in at least three ways. Egrant was an allegation based on what someone told a journalist. That didn’t necessarily make it false, but it did make it possibly false. Second, on Egrant there was no solid proof whatsoever. There was talk of papers in a safe, and documents in a cloud, but neither safe nor cloud ever materialised. Believers will say the proof was sneaked away, but in turn there’s no proof that that ever happened.
Third, both Michelle and Joseph Muscat denied throughout that there was a shred of truth to the story. In fairness, the Prime Minister even put his job on the line. Egrant, then, was a textbook case of an allegation that, if Magistrate Aaron Bugeja’s inquiry has anything going for it (I think it does), turned out to be false.
17 Black couldn’t be more different. We know for a fact, because there are the documents that show it, that Mizzi and Schembri set up shell companies in Panama. (I don’t like the passive ‘companies were set up for Mizzi and Schembri’, which suggests they woke up one morning to discover that someone had set up companies for them while they slept.)
We also know, again on the strength of evidence, that 17 Black was intended as the source of income for those companies. Now there was always the outside chance that 17 Black was owned by a record company that meant to pass on money to Mizzi and Schembri for their upcoming yodelling duo album.
There’s no murkiness, just a limpid tale of corruption at the highest level of government
Thankfully not, musically speaking. In fact, it was owned by Yorgen Fenech of Tumas Group, part of the conglomerate involved in big energy deals when Konrad Mizzi was the energy minister. If this isn’t a smoking gun, I don’t know what is.
There’s more. Unlike the Prime Minister on Egrant, Fenech has not so far denied that he owned 17 Black. I’d expect someone of that calibre who was faced with a false allegation to use all of the tremendous firepower in his arsenal to deny it, at the very least. It’s well known by now that neither Mizzi nor Schembri had any hope of denying that they owned Panama accounts. No Egrant there either, then.
Mizzi’s defence seems to be that he wasn’t aware of 17 Black’s existence, and that no money ever made it to his Panama account. (Thus, the infamous 92 euros.) He may be telling the truth on the first bit. The whole point of this kind of dodgy financial world is that it is so complex that it leaves the taxman clueless, and out of pocket. It’s not unthinkable that even its beneficiaries don’t understand exactly what goes on.
Mizzi may even be telling the truth on the second bit, but that’s irrelevant. If University discovered an e-mail exchange between me and my students at exam time in which I gave them my bank account number and agreed to borrow their money, it wouldn’t be much of a defence for me to say that no money was in fact ever transferred.
In that case, I’d have a choice between contesting the authenticity of the e-mails, and saying that my intentions were entirely pure. In the latter case, my employer would mumble something about the marines and terminate my employment. In the former, a fact-finding exercise would be held while I went on long leave.
Which brings me to the inquiries, due process and other things so beloved of Musumeci and his fellow apologists. An inquiry is a fact-finding exercise, useful in cases – such as Egrant – in which allegations are made without much to support them.
It follows that no inquiry is required for 17 Black, because the facts are already there. When you know that your glasses are perched on your nose, you don’t normally look for them. The Prime Minister and his apologists are effectively asking us to participate in a kind of treasure hunt in which we pretend to hide things and then proceed to look for them.
So intolerable is the situation that even organisations like Graffitti and the Integra Foundation, whose wont is usually elsewhere, have spoken out in no uncertain terms. Not that it matters much to the Prime Minister what a couple of minnows think, or that they think at all, given his popularity ratings.
This is it really. Politically, Muscat enjoys what is quite possibly the most secure tenure of any Prime Minister ever. His majorities at the polls, and in Parliament, are stratospheric. Exactly why he feels he cannot afford to lose one government minister and a chief of staff is anybody’s guess.
mafalzon@hotmail.com
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece