Les jeux sont faits

So the prime minister pulled what strings he could, so did the foreign minister while the finance minister, perhaps the only uncompromised of them all, worked harder than them all (and showed how green he is at that level by expressing premature optimism)

American he knows, forgetting this was a man who had been in this place, as Perm Sec, since before 2013, and who has been there while the regularity regime was being dismantled by Joseph Muscat and Edward Scicluna (wait, Scicluna said he was not in the Kitchen Cabinet, as a result of which he got kicked upwards to be the Governor of the Central Bank and member of the Governing Council of the ECB).

At the end it was all for nothing. Now the timid, hopeful expressions of the past days got turned into anger, spite and bile. Evarist Bartolo said they would not do this to bigger countries, as if any country big or small had accumulated so many black marks. Robert Abela bleated the FATF grey-listing was unfair, though he knows very well the specific reasons for the grey-listing.

The government even spun to the media that Romania too had been grey-listed, and this was repeated by the media and three days later has not been corrected. It was not true. As if it makes a difference between Malta being the first and only EU member state to be so punished or would it make any difference if instead of one country there were two.

The rather cryptic threat that Malta would block by its veto the workings of the EU remains there and we can only wait and see if it will be put in action.

On the popular level the dogs of war, by which we mean Pjazza and Bedingfield were unleashed to the delight of the PL supporters who can only point towards the coming election victory as a justification of anything done by Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela, whatever FATF says blaming the two PN MEPs for this cataclysm.

Indeed the greater part of the country has no idea how the greylisting will affect us all. For many, the fact that Malta has been promoted to the Green List of travel by the British government is far more concrete and easy to understand.

Otherwise, it was all business as usual, which in our case means major delays wherever there are roadworks. The war against Covid looks like it’s being won, though just like in other countries the vaccine is giving many a sense of invincibility.

Just as we open up to more tourists from the UK the number of daily infections has shot up beyond 18,000 a day. And crowds are again filling football stadia.

All this, I repeat, is more real to many people than all the rhetoric that has been spent on FATF.

More, the Knights of St John, wearing their centuries-old regalia, celebrated, as they have been doing for centuries, the birth of John the Baptist. Nothing has changed, who cares about FATF?

And in Brussels the European parliament was discussing a motion that included abortion which was supported by one of Labour’s six MEPs much to the anger of many Labour voters.

Apart from the ignominy of being the first EU member state to be grey-listed, it will be harder to export, harder to get credit. It is only thanks to our being in the Eurozone that the impact is not bigger.

This is where the pressures begin, if we want to shed the greylisting. Many are saying the first to be attacked will be the fiscal regime which taxes foreign companies at just 5%. Or the selling of Maltese (EU) passports.

Iceland did it – it was grey-listed but it made it to the side of the virtuous, though at a huge cost. And I think the government was changed too.

Here the grey-listing is one of those things the parties throw at each other. With huge doses of inconsistencies. Such as: can the Leader of the Opposition find out who from his MPs has been selling passports as a sideline? Can he remove them from MPs? Can he submit a resolution to the coming top-level meeting of the party by means of which all candidates in the next election must undertake a solemn declaration they will not, directly or otherwise, sell passports or act as fiduciaries to brassplate companies? Can he show us he has what it takes to take difficult decisions if he were to become prime minister?

Many in the PN ranks were aghast their leader offered help (later rejected by the government) and collaboration. That’s their mess, many argued, let them clean it themselves. They were reminded how in 1987 Eddie Fenech Adami was forced and blackmailed into keeping on the books the thousands that had been employed by KMB on white elephants such as Malta Shipbuilding.

The real risk is that Malta ends up like one of those towns Roberto Saviano writes about in the hinterland of Naples where the Camorra is the law and the government.

And yet Italy is not grey-listed.