Labour's former treasurer holds tens of millions in Maltese bank accounts for Saadi and Mutussim Gaddafi, while Labour's 'current administration' fudges its statements

Joe Sammut, the former Labour Party treasurer to whom Saadi and Mutassim Gaddafi entrusted their tens of millions in Maltese bank accounts. They didn't find him in the Yellow Pages.

It’s interesting that those who have spoken on behalf of the Labour Party feel themselves unable to make a categoric statement that Labour has never received funding from Gaddafi.

The two statements made so far, by the Labour Party ‘current administration’ and by George Vella yesterday on Super One, are qualified.

They can’t be categoric because they don’t want to be caught out as liars. Common sense tells them that a dictator who couldn’t distinguish between party and government, and a political party (Labour) which knew no such distinction either, would not have distinguished between funding the government and funding the party.

And Labour boasted as recently as September 2009, the 40th anniversary of The Revolution, about how much money Gaddafi gave the Labour government.

And that’s before we even get started on the CIA documents on Wikileaks, which show that the CIA took as a given the funding of the Malta Labour Party by Muammar Gaddafi.

If the ‘current administration’ of the Labour Party cannot be categoric in its denial that Labour ever received funding from Gaddafi, then this leads to all sorts of questions about how the party is run (or failing that, they are lying through clenched teeth).

Are they telling us that the party is so badly run that donations are not recorded? That leaves a lot of scope for abuse. Heaven knows, in that case, how many ‘not in the current administration’ people lined their pockets.

But of course, the really banging great clue to all this is that the Labour Party’s very own one-time treasurer – and the treasurer is the man who collects and records donations – was exposed earlier this year as the accountant who handles Saadi and Mutassim Gaddafi’s tens of millions in Maltese bank accounts, and pays their bills.

So how did they find Joe Sammut and select him for this position of trust -through the Yellow Pages, I don’t think.

The Nationalist Party, in stark contrast to Labour, is 100% categoric in saying that it never, at no point in its history, received donations or funding from the Gaddafi regime.

It is able to do this. The Labour Party is not, and instead fudges and qualifies.

The Times this morning reports:

“On the contrary, the Nationalist Party was on the receiving end of several Gaddafi-funded Labour campaigns including the campaign against EU membership,” a party spokesman claimed, adding that the CIA document proved one of the instances of funding.