Who should actually resign over Egrant?
Calls for the Prime Minister’s resignation have come from far and wide, practically since the outbreak of the multifaceted Panama Papers-Egrant scandal, which, at least on the surface, is responsible for having catalysed the snap election the country is now facing in just over a fortnight.
The Opposition leader has been calling for the head of Joseph Muscat ever since he failed to take any real action against his right- and left-hand men who were exposed in the Panama Papers, and those calls have multiplied since the latest instalments in the saga, in which the Prime Minister’s wife has, rightly or wrongly, also been implicated.
For starters, it is a no-brainer that the Prime Minister would have to resign should it transpire that his wife owns that third mysterious company in Panama, that was set up right after the last election, alongside those of the prime Minister’s chief of staff and the then energy minister.
Firstly, that company was never declared and secondly, he has consistently denied any links to the mysterious Egrant Inc. But now the Prime Minister has been throwing that ball back into the Opposition
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leader’s court, and he has been challenging him to resign if those allegations are not proven to have been true.
The problem with the Prime Minister’s challenge is that, although the Opposition leader has quite willingly jumped onto the Egrant bandwagon, he has not actually taken any personal responsibility for those particular allegations. Those specific allegations have been made by a journalist, as we all know.
What the Opposition leader has taken responsibility for in this second season of Malta and the Panama Papers, is the related subject matter of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff having taken kickbacks from the sale of Maltese passports.
And the Opposition leader has taken full responsibility for those allegations, because he made them himself and because he was so sure of the documented evidence in his possession, that he has even taken that evidence before two magistrates holding inquiries. And just last night he has also taken ownership of new claims of yet more dirty business involving the chief of staff.
As such, it is perfectly clear in these respective calls for resignations on the Egrant case, that the onus on the Prime Minister is exponentially larger than it is on the Opposition leader. If true, the Prime Minister would have to go beyond any reasonable doubt, and if false, the Opposition leader would have simply been wrong, to a certain degree, on his accusations about Egrant and about Egrant alone.
If politicians were to resign every time they made a false accusation, there would hardly be a standing Parliament in this country, it would be a matter of one by-election after another, given the numbers of untruths that are spread in this bitterly politically polarised country of ours.
Perhaps, the Prime Minister should be challenging the Opposition leader to resign if the allegations he is actually making himself – those against the Prime Minister’s chief of staff - prove to be false. But he doesn’t appear to be doing that for some reason. Perhaps the Prime Minister is pretty comfortable about the accusations being made about Egrant, but less so about those being faced by his chief of staff.