Scicluna, Bedingfield and CBS
So what is perhaps the United States’ most popular, most respected and longest-running prime time news show, 60 Minutes – broadcast on one of the country’s three major networks for decades on end – finally dips its toes into Malta’s murky waters and instead of the prime minister, who do we get to represent us?
The government’s leading ministerial apologist and the government’s chief spin-doctor-turnedMember-of-Parliament. And despite their best efforts to call white black and black white, they both failed miserably.
The producers of the 14-minute Malta segment of the show, which aired on Sunday evening to millions upon millions of Americans, say they had repeatedly asked to speak to Prime
Minister Joseph Muscat, but were told that he did not have the time. Now we have no idea how the show was planned and plotted but it was certainly not on the drop of a hat.
Perhaps after his BBC performance – where he was described as the Artful Dodger of Europe, a nickname that has stuck for some time now – the prime minister is more reticent about being asked real questions from real journalists. He has, after all, also been avoiding and refusing interviews with the independent Maltese press for years now.
So instead of the prime minister, the government rolls out MP Glenn Bedingfield and Finance Minister Edward Scicluna. How many other ways are there to make Malta look like at Third World country than to have the government’s chief spin doctor and the finance minister who has allowed so much to transpire under his bespectacled watch – and made, time and time again, to defend what we are certain he knows is the indefensible.
Bedingfield, on his part, insists he has no concerns about corruption in Malta. Of course he doesn’t; he spent five years as a person of trust within the Office of the Prime Minister fending them off and this legislature throwing his weight around in Parliament and occasionally being thrown out for profanity.
According to the MP, all the accusations, allegation and revelations – there is a clear difference between these three words which many take as synonyms – as a politically charged smear campaign against the government for which he works.
As for Scicluna, his performance was also somewhat lacking in that stellar quality one would have hoped for so as to offset Bedingfield’s blanket denials.
But, yet again, Scicluna plays the ‘All allegations, they are all allegations’ card, which, let’s face it, no one really believes. It is sad, a little like the way every prisoner in jail is really innocent. Pathetic. What does it actually take to say yes, we have some problems and we are fixing them? Such an approach would certainly earn the government more plaudits than it is otherwise getting.
At least Scicluna admits that the ‘allegations’ are serious, that he is not trying to downplay them but, at the end of the day, these are matters for the courts. Scicluna, however, does not go on to explain how members of government and even the prime minister himself are doing their utmost to scuttle those court cases.
And if we think that those people across the pond matter little to us, or vice-versa, we are sadly mistaken. Some of the issues Malta is grappling with, such as money laundering and corruption, are having an effect all the way over in the United States, make no mistake.
Let us not forget it was US investigators who cracked the Pilatus case, made accusations against its chairman and who are seeking to put him behind bars for 125 years for money laundering and sanctions busting. It was also American investigators who cracked the Venezuela case, in which over a billion euros in Venezuelan public funds were laundered, over €500 million of which was laundered through Malta by the Venezuelan president’s own stepsons.
And, last but not least, let us also not forget all those citizenships, another topic that was up for discussion on Sunday evening, and how, most especially under the watch of President Donald Trump, Malta’s visa waiver programme could very well vanish into thin air if the genuineness of our citizens actually begins to be called into question.
It’s the prime minister’s prerogative to not be interviewed or to send others in his stead, but this was most definitely a job for him considering its sensitivity. But, then again, the facility to keep yourself out of the line of fire and to be able to blame lame comments on your stooges is also a prime minister’s prerogative.