Keep calm and continue pillaging the country 

Liar, fraudster, loser, delusional and traitor are but few of the words which Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his cronies used to attack former PN leader Simon Busuttil. At face value, there’s nothing new in these latest personal attacks. In Malta’s daily political debate its just the “latest” episode in the perpetual farce.

Yet, this is not an isolated incident, nor is it a mere case of tempers flaring in public. Simon Busuttil reiterated his belief that Muscat owns a secret offshore company and Labour went ballistic.   

If Muscat and his mercenaries are steadfast in their belief that Egrant was a complete fabrication and is owned by somebody who has nothing to do with the Labour regime they would simply laugh it off and carry on pillaging the country with its financial masters.

Muscat’s trusted friends at Nexia BT, Brian Tonna and Karl Cini, know who owns Egrant. After all, they were the ones who opened secret companies in Panama for Muscat’s brothers-in-arms Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. 

While details for Schembri and Mizzi were given in emails, curiously in an email sent on 25 March 2013, Cini told Mossak Foneseca’s legal assistant Cristina Rios that Nexia BT is not Egrant’s Ultimate Beneficiary Owner but it will be an individual whose details would be provided over Skype. 

If Labour and Nexia BT had no difficulty in confirming that Schembri and Mizzi’s owned offshore interests following the Panama Papers leak, I’m pretty sure they are ready to reveal Egrant’s real owner to clear Muscat’s name once and for all. 

To bring this sad spectacle to an end, all Muscat has to do is convince the owner to take one for the team and tell the world who owns the company. Instead, Tonna and Cini refuse to cooperate with the authorities and Muscat persists in playing hide and seek by refusing to publish the Egrant inquiry report while leaking bits of information – which cannot be verified – for his exclusive benefit. If he is adamant that his wife’s signature was falsified, he must come up with the beef and tell us who falsified the signatures, where and when.   

If Egrant does not belong to Muscat or anyone connected to him, there is absolutely no need for him to threaten Busuttil that he will never be able to set foot in the country again. If Egrant does not belong to anyone within the Labour regime, there is no need for Glenn Bedingfield to lose his cool and get kicked out of Parliament for blasphemy. And if Egrant is owned by an individual loosely connected to Labour I’m sure she or he will be handsomely rewarded for their noble act of selflessness. 

Yet, Muscat and his mercenaries have upped the ante and persist with their coordinated attack on Busuttil with the aide of sycophants on the other side of the political divide such as Hermann Schiavone.  

Schiavone, who for years was barred from contesting elections on the PN ticket, said Busuttil’s position was not congruent with the party’s line. “The party leader has repeatedly made it clear that he has full confidence in the inquiring magistrate and the party accepts the conclusions of the Egrant report.”

If that is the case, then why is Schiavone’s leader asking for the report to be published? And the last time I checked, the Egrant report does not conclude that Michelle Muscat does not own the secret company but simply found no evidence to sustain these claims. 

More importantly, Busuttil is suffering the brunt of a full scale blitz, as Daphne Caruana Galizia suffered before and after her assassination.  

Muscat must have thought that his theatrics upon the conclusion of the magisterial inquiry brought the Egrant saga to an end. He must have thought that he got rid of the albatross around his neck and his prospects for a top job in Brussels looked bright again. 

Yet, unexpectedly the noose got tighter again following the latest revelations by the Daphne Project. If he is as innocent as he says he is all he has to do is publish the Egrant report, take legal action against whoever falsified the signatures and whoever fabricated what he described as the biggest lie in Maltese political history. 

However, it seems that Muscat, like Cardona, is not ready to put the allegations to bed. Mysteriously, despite his claims of innocence Cardona refused the opportunity to prove that he never visited a brothel while on official business in Germany. And so far, for some reason I cannot comprehend Muscat refuses to tell us who is the real owner of Egrant is and end the Egrant saga once and for all.

With Daphne Caruana Galizia gone, Busuttil and Egrant out of the equation and no more doubts about Muscat’s integrity, the Prime Minister can get down to the real business of turning Malta into Dubai in the Mediterranean, built on low taxes for foreign corporations, cheap labour and soulless blocks of cement.