The Pilatus narrative is more than somewhat lacking in authenticity

All throughout the Pilatus Bank saga that enveloped the nation over the course of the l ast week, the narrative being spewed by the government’s acolytes has been more than somewhat lacking in authenticity.

The mind- numbing surety with which so many are so confidently claiming that the arrest of the bank’s chairman in the United States has nothing to do whatsoever with Malta simply beggars belief.

This newspaper cannot definitively say that a single cent of that $ 115 million which the bank’s chairman is accused of sending to Iran in defiance of American sanctions had anything to do with Malta, nor can it say that it did not.

The fact of the matter is that, as matters stand, no one really knows. That is the only thing that can be said with any degree of surety.

However, the Maltese police, in a statement in the wake of the arrest, went to lengths to stress that the American authorities have assured their Maltese counterparts that there was no Malta connection in this messy Iran sanctionsavoiding business, for which the chairman of a Maltese bank is facing 125 years in prison.

But in the same breath, the Maltese police have also said that American i nvestigatory teams will be visiting Malta in the near future to discuss the chairman's money laundering case.

So many people l atched on to that statement but so many failed to see the very obvious di- chotomy in it.

Not only is the cleanliness of the initial capital i njected i nto the bank when i t first registered as a company in Malta back in 2013 being called into question, there was also a very evident overlap of at l east four months between when the bank’s chairman was being i nvestigated by the US and when the bank was licensed as a credit institution in Malta.

In fact, the US i ndictment against the bank's chairman leaves the door open as to where the misdeeds were committed. To quote straight from that indictment: "... up to and including at least in or about May 2014, in the Southern District of New York, Turkey, Switzerland, Iran, and elsewhere, the defendant, others known and unknown... did knowingly transport, transmit, and transfer monetary instruments..."

The key word here is ' elsewhere', and that very clearly l eaves the door open to any number of possibilities, as it very well should be.

One wonders what i s going on here. If there was no connection to Malta as the Maltese police force is saying, then why is the US Federal Bureau of Investigation coming to Malta to talk about the case at all?

Then there are people of the ilk of Edward Zammit Lewis, who made a television appearance this week saying that what the Pilatus chairman had in those bags about a year ago were clothes and nothing else. How on Earth could he know that? Did he pack the chairman’s baggage?

It may not have even been those Egrant documents that were whisked away that night, it could have been any number of sensitive and possibly i ncriminating documents, with the chairman having sensed or having been i nformed that an investigation was imminent. The fact is that no one will ever know the answer to that one.

Then, on Friday, we had t he Police Commissioner who said he could not f athom t he renewed calls f or his resignation over t his l atest debacle. But t he f act of t he matter is t hat t hose calls were not really about t he current situation but, rather, t hey were f resh calls f or his resignation f or not having sealed off t he bank until t he f ollowing morning some 11 months ago.

He t old t he press t hat i f anything comes out t hat l i nks Malta to t his l atest development in t he United States, t hat he would understand t hose calls f or his resignation. We will cert ainly hold him t o his word should t hat come t o pass.

From the Police Commissioner to people l i ke Zammit Lewis to the trolls infiltrating the social media quite prematurely claiming the events leading to the chairman’s arrest were absolutely not Malta- related, there i s something patently false, and there is also a huge dose of post- truth politics here in this running narrative.