Alternattiva has called on the Auditor-General to investigate this government’s entire 2014 amnesty scheme

The very strict rules of the government’s asset registration/amnesty scheme last year did not allow the acceptance of funds from sources that could not be accounted for.

Given that Ninu Zammit was in cabinet for 20 years and not permitted to do any private income-earning work during that time, his $3.2 million are suspect.

And if he claims that he earned and deposited the money before 1987, then the likelihood of his being able to account for it with documentation like invoices and other paperwork, as required under the rules, is negligible.

So it’s looking like the very strict rules were not very strictly applied. And if they were not very strictly applied to help out Ninu Zammit, then it might well have happened with others too. Now Alternattiva Demokratika is calling on the Auditor General to investigate the entire scheme.

The prime minister is now saying that the government doesn’t know who applied for that scheme and who got an amnesty “because the information is securely held at the Central Bank” which processes and manages the scheme.

What tosh. It is not a coincidence that Ninu Zammit, then a cabinet minister, skipped all three registration/amnesty schemes created by the government of which he formed part, then jumped at the one created by Joseph Muscat’s government last year.

If there is no way the government could know who applies for and gets an amnesty, then Zammit would gone for an earlier amnesty under the PN government. But he didn’t. Zammit formed part of the government for 20 years. He knows what governments know and what they don’t know, what they can find out and what they can’t.