The Egrant thesis

Whether we like it or not, the Panama Papers scandal will determine the future political development of this country.

Not poverty (94,000 people live close to or beneath the poverty line according to the NGOs); not amateurish governance (the lack of attention to detail that has characterised the Justice portfolio, for example); not the environment – the construction of the American University on ODZ land, the mega-towers in Sliema and Mrieħel, etc); not the neoliberal extravaganza. No, it will be none of these issues but the Panama Papers scandal.

Objectively speaking, this is completely irrational, because the other issues are also extraordinarily important and this administration is not delivering as it should.

But nowhere is it written that politics is rational. Perceptions, beliefs, passions, emotions, expectations, grievances, backroom (or fourth-floor) deals – these are the ingredients of politics. Rational analysis is then left to the historians.

Again, from an objective point of view, the Panama Papers scandal should not have dragged on and on like some incurable disease. The cure was there from day one, and should have been stoically applied without delay. The gangrened limbs of the government should have been amputated at once – Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi should have been asked to resign, and moral equilibrium restored. Instead, the wrong decision was taken, Schembri and Mizzi were retained and now we face moral chaos.

Retaining Schembri and Mizzi seems to lend a humongous amount of credibility to the thesis being proposed with characteristic vehemence by Daphne Caruana Galizia – that the third, mysterious company Egrant ultimately belongs to Mrs Joseph Muscat. One need not elaborate on this point, as the underlying reasoning should be obvious to anyone who has at least two functioning brain cells. Only those who are blinded by partisan passion, or whose pockets are lined by government handouts, fail to do the maths.

At this juncture, I have to add a short personal note. When I was gathering material for my book L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa. IlPanama Papers u l-Poter, I kept asking myself who the owner of Egrant could be. I was then asked the same question by a number of Net TV journalists, and I declined to give a definite answer. I did not even mention Egrant in my book, the reason being that, whereas many elements pointed at the Prime Minister being the owner, his non-verbal communication indicated otherwise. Now that Caruana Galizia has made her claims, we can come up with a hypothesis. True, legally speaking, whatever is acquired by one spouse belongs to both unless they agree otherwise. But on a psychological level, it is easy to convince yourself that you do not own something that is in the name of your spouse. Having said that, extrapolated to its logical conclusion, this argument is neither here nor there. The Prime Minister’s non-verbal communication and his strong, repeated denials only indicate that he is telling the truth when he says that the company is not – at least technically – his. Needless to say, the mental reservations he makes have to be kept in mind (he was schooled by the Jesuits after all) when issuing such statements.

What can be concluded from the fact that the Iranian owner and a high-ranking official of Pilatus Bank seem to have emptied the bank’s archives only a few hours after alleged that Egrant’s Pilatus account had received money from a member of Azerbaijan’s ruling family? It might be that the transaction really has taken place or that the bank has other dirty business, completely unrelated to Egrant and Azerbaijan, which it does not want the police poking its nose in. So, this leaves us neither here nor there – at least taken by itself.

But when we consider that the police did not act immediately, then the unhindered evacuation of sensitive documents takes on another dimension. (For the record, I believe that those suitcases contained documents and files and I will not readily buy any other story.) Regardless of whether the bank ended up expatriating Egrant related documents, the crux of the matter is that bank officials emptied the bank’s archives literally under the nation’s nose, and the police did not lift a finger to prevent this – not until it was too late, at any rate. Does this not signal the meltdown of the country’s institutions?

This is why, as I and many others have been saying for a number of months now, the Panama Papers scandal is an incredible threat to our democracy. That the people are not reacting as one might have expected simply means that we are a tabloid democracy with a high participation rate. By this I mean that the high participation rate which impresses gullible foreigners who think they know everything there is to know about little Malta because it is small, in reality means that Malta’s democracy is one big Jerry Springer show.

This was confirmed on Friday, when evidence, accusations and defences were the protagonists of the national talk show. The whole idea was ill-conceived, I’m sorry to say, and was a disservice to democracy. The Prime Minister is wrong to ask his counterpart for evidence. The Leader of the Opposition is right to argue that it is his decision as to whether or not he should produce any evidence and it is not up to the Prime Minister.

Is this a frame-up? If the Prime Minister had not fought tooth and nail to retain Mr Schembri and Dr Mizzi last year, then we might take the frame-up thesis into consideration. But given Dr Muscat’s illogical defensive stance in favour of his right-hand man and his favourite minister, one cannot take the frame-up thesis seriously.

At this moment in time, it is still a matter of theses: Caruana Galizia’s thesis that Egrant belongs to Mrs Joseph Muscat and that it received money, and Dr Muscat’s thesis that it is a frameup. So far, judging by the theses themselves in their contexts, it seems to me that Dr Muscat’s thesis is the weaker one although, oddly enough, the more alluringly put forward. Let us not forget that Dr Muscat is very good at playing the underdog.

However, in a normal country – one that does not function like a Jerry Springer show –Dr Muscat would have already resigned. And that is not a thesis: that is adhering to the unwritten rules of a functioning lib-