The tribe that lost its head

The events of the last two weeks have been like a rollercoaster ride beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

From the calm and serenity of Easter week to the jaw-dropping revelation that allegedly exposed Egrant’s owner as the Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s wife, with much of the exposure explaining many things and sticking in people’s minds. Sticking because it fits in with many things in the past, such as why no action was ever really taken by the Prime Minister against his chief of staff Keith Schembri, and Minister Konrad Mizzi, who both opened a Panama account with intended deposits of millions of money a year, potentially laundered money with implied tax evasion intentions. It also explains why the Prime Minister never forced Keith Schembri to appear before the EP’s PANA committee investigating the word-wide graft exposure. It explains changes in the Maltese Parliament’s rules of ethics leading to the lack of need to declare a wife’s assets. It explains the many trips to Azerbaijan and Dubai!

We were regaled with video footage of the Iranian head of the practically unknown Pilatus Bank going to the bank furtively at night and exiting from a side-door with bags containing what one presumes to be the original incriminating documents removed from the safe, while the police were nowhere to be seen even after being alerted. These bags were then loaded on a night plane bound for none other than Azerbaijan! Other revelations showed that both Brian Tonna, the Prime Minister’s consultant, and Keith Schembri, his right hand man, both have accounts in these banks. We were told that the Prime Minister’s wife received payments in her other accounts from the daughter of Azerbaijan’s president. We were also told that Keith Schembri was receiving kickbacks on the sale of Maltese passports to foreigners. Everyone was utterly flabbergasted except for the blind who did not wish to see!

We were also told that a magisterial enquiry was called after the evidence got away, but which produced three witnesses anyway, some with further information coming from other whistleblowers. We learn that the government’s own anti-graft investigative unit, the FIAU, had revealed a year earlier that kickbacks to Keith Schembri had been flagged with no action being taken by the Police or the Attorney General who both evidently knew about the report! We learnt of the hardships the main whistleblower suffered while working at Pilatus Bank! We learn of her not being paid at all and how she was framed by the bank on trumped-up charges and prevented her from attending her mother’s funeral in Russia. Hey, this is not North Korea; it is the Presidency of the European Union Council of Ministers called Malta.

In the meantime, all we hear from the Prime Minister and his three musketeers is one denial after the other, which is not surprising, considering they are all facing fraud charges and possible prison sentences. There is an aggressive attack on the credentials of the whistle-blower which they are legally supposed to protect. There is the sudden resignation of the Labour Party’s whip who had seen enough to be able to come to his own logical conclusion. All of a sudden, a general election is called a year before its time!

In medicine and philosophy there is a maxim we use call Ockham’s razor. It says that “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate”, the simplest explanation out of several possible explanations is the more likely one. In this case, no one needs a university degree to conclude the more likely explanation. The likelihood is that