Why did the crooked Ninu Zammit wait until Labour was in government?

By his own admission, Ninu Zammit has been keeping money outside Malta, concealed from the tax authorities even of the very government of which he formed part for 20 years, since the 1970s.

During all that time, he lied and cheated. He lied to parliament, lied to Prime Ministers Fenech Adami and Gonzi, lied to his cabinet colleagues and lied to the electorate.

During all the years – two decades – that he sat in cabinet, there were six or seven amnesties on the registration or repatriation of overseas assets. As a member of the cabinet he discussed them and approved them, while concealing from his colleagues the fact that he could take advantage of them and so had a vested interest.

But for 20 long years when he sat in cabinet and another five long years after that when Dr Gonzi did not appoint him to cabinet but the PN was still in government – we’re talking 25 years here, in all – he never sought to repatriate or register his overseas assets.

Instead, he waited until the PN was voted out, and the Labour government gave its first amnesty, to finally put his affairs in order (after a fashion) by using that amnesty.

Why did he skip all those PN government amnesties and wait for Labour’s first one? Using a PN government amnesty would have forced him to reveal his assets to the very prime minister and colleagues from whom he had been determinedly concealing them. He didn’t want to reveal them, as that would have meant revealing his lies and duplicity and being booted out of the cabinet position which might well have given him access to some of the sources of those funds.

Zammit seethed on the backbench for the last five years of Gonzi’s government, then unilaterally decided to make a personal announcement to the media just weeks before the general election saying that he wouldn’t be standing. A little warning bell went off in the back of my mind when it happened – here’s another one who’s up to something, I remember thinking – but it was lost in the ensuing electoral fray.

And now we’ve found out what he was up to – thanks to today’s story and this afternoon’s statement. It doesn’t take much imagination to work out why Ninu Zammit felt more comfortable revealing his tax-evasion assets to Prime Minister Muscat than he did to Prime Ministers Fenech Adami and Gonzi.

It’s telling, isn’t it, that the Labour Party machine has not gone into overdrive ripping both Michael Falzon and Ninu Zammit to shreds. The internet Labour army is actually defending Falzon. They’re all in cahoots. It’s revolting.