How many people actually have access to this supposed secret inquiry?
Three government ministers were let off the hook only by the skin of their teeth last week by a magistrate, simply because they cannot be forced to give testimony that may incriminate themselves.
This is absolutely great going for those who expect their subjects to abide by the law to the letter.
Ministers Edward Scicluna, Konrad Mizzi and Chris Cardona were asked to disclose the source of direct quotes they had used from the supposedly secret Egrant report in an ongoing case lodged by NGO Repubblika.
The NGO turned up the heat on the Vitals Global Healthcare heist case, arguing that Ministers Scicluna, Cardona and Mizzi had given the group of investors behind VGH an unfair advantage during the contract’s selection process.
The case argues that despite the fact that there being abundant evidence of wrongdoing, the country’s institutions had also not done their job and had taken no action insofar as ‘serious suspicions of corruption and money laundering’ is concerned.
The ruse was called by The Shift News, which had also revealed the offshore companies into which funds were being funnelled, and Repubblika promptly made a request for the Attorney General to take all steps necessary in terms of the request for a monitoring order monitoring orders.
The fact that the ministers had access to the Egrant report after it was found they quoted had unpublished extracts had also been exposed by the same news outlet.
A magistrate hearing the case late last week ruled the ministers had been ‘extremely evasive in their reply and cast no light on that requested by the plaintiffs’ when asked where they had sourced their information from.
The ministers had been asked to indicate exactly where they were quoting from and whether this information was in the public domain, as well as how they came to know the information, which had only been included in the Egrant report, which only a handful of people are meant to have access to, and the three ministers in question are not on that list.
In fact, the court noted that ‘grave and serious’ situation if the ministers were actually aware of any unpublished extracts.
The court, however, found the ministers enjoyed a right to silence and it could not force them to divulge the information.
That was, legally, the correct decision of course because a court cannot force anyone to say anything that would incriminate themselves, and quoting from extracts of a secret could, in fact, as the magistrate pointed out, very well constitute a breach of the law.
But being legally correct and being morally or politically correct are different matters altogether.
The government hides behind legalisms at every fork in the road, but it rarely does the right thing morally or politically when it comes to such because, it seems, not enough people are demanding that it acts as such.
More likely is the fact that the government clearly has no leg to stand when it comes to any of these scandals, otherwise it would just bare all and come clean. That is what honest people with nothing to hide do. But that is what the current government seldom does for some reason.
It is nothing short of a travesty of justice that the Opposition leader, let alone the public at large given the politically-sensitive contents of the report, is denied access despite filing court proceedings, while government ministers seem to have a complete run of the document and even had the audacity to have quoted from it in court filings.
We concur with Repubblika’s demand that the Prime Minister should order ministers to declare where they read the Egrant report. If doesn’t, the travesty will simply continue unabated but, then again, one tends to believe that this is exactly what the government wants.