Mizzi and Schembri blaming each other

As the interpretations of all that was said and done on Monday when the PANA Committee held its fact-finding mission continue to roll in, one could easily be forgiven for having the impression that both Minister Konrad Mizzi and Office of the Prime Minister chief of staff Keith Schembri were both only too happy to have attempted to throw each other under the proverbial bus.

That is because in their scramble to evade the scrutiny of, one the one part, and to explain away dubious overseas financial vehicles, on the other part, both have in a way pointed accusatory fingers at each other.

Here are the facts, without delving too much into the merits of the multiple and multifarious goings on that day.

As far as Mr Schembri is concerned, the visiting European Parliamentarians were outraged over the fact that he had not made himself available to them for questioning and explanations. They were even more outraged over Mr Schembri having questioned the committee’s mandate. Mr Schembri is said to have had his letter making his excuses delivered by a messenger to the PANA Committee’s chairman in the street.

But inside that letter Mr Schembri had gone on to highlight that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – the body responsible for leaking the Panama Papers – had not even mentioned him in its reportage.

In making his apologies, Mr Schembri wrote to the Committee: “Clearly it is pertinent to

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note that the ICIJ did not feel it relevant to the scope of its investigative journalistic work to mention me in the release of its data.”

In so doing, Mr Schembri could easily have been interpreted as having told the Committee: ‘It’s not me you want, it’s Konrad’.

Those who followed the leak of the Panama Papers here in Malta will recall how Dr Mizzi had been highlighted by the ICIJ as the only serving EU minister to have been implicated in the leak. Dr Mizzi had even been treated to his own section in the ICIJ’s ‘Panama Papers Power Players’ section replete with a cartoon caricature of the Maltese minister.

After that, when Dr Mizzi appeared before the Committee, he insisted, among so many other things, that his own advisors, Nexia BT, must have confused him with Mr Schembri. It was reported that Dr Mizzi, during the Committee hearing said that it was not he but, rather, Mr Schembri who had wanted, in what appears to be an attempt at money laundering, a Panamanian company to line it with the proceeds from operations in the recycling and remote gaming sectors. Dr Mizzi added that Nexia BT must have confused him with Mr Schembri, implying that it was not him, but rather Mr Schembri who should be looked into for any possible attempt to launder money through the dubious Panamanian set-up.

The leaked emails, however, refer to both Mr Schembri’s and Dr Mizzi’s parallel Panamanian companies serving as holding companies for operations in the recycling and remote gaming sectors.

“We also trade in used tyres. Collected tyres throughout Europe and North Africa are shredded and then resold to tarmac plants across southern Europe and North Africa. Waste trading is one of the fastest growing commodity trading globally. Our main trading agreements are with locally-based waste collectors, waste separating companies and processing companies, haulage companies, shipping companies and waste buyers in India and China,” one of the leaked e-mail said.

A further due diligence questionnaire submitted to the New Zealand trustees said the underlying Panamanian companies would be engaging in “management consultancy and brokerage”, a fact that Dr Mizzi appears to have not acknowledged in his testimony.

But the New Zealand trustees found such an explanation a little too vague for their liking and asked for more information. To that, Mossack Fonseca then informed Nexia BT that, “As both settlors [plural, Mizzi and Schembri] are PEP (politically exposed persons), our NZ colleagues need to be comfortable that sufficient due diligence has been carried out to ascertain that funds being settled are not subject to any corruption risk and ideally that they come from income generated prior to the settlors’ [plural] political appointment.”

If that does not imply that both companies set up respectively by both Dr Mizzi and Mr Schembri were involved in the same schemes, we do not know what would. Either that or Dr Mizzi and Mr Schembri were working so much in tandem that even their own accountants could no longer tell the difference.