A shady Prime Minister

Ask yourself this question. If you were the boss of a major corporation and discovered that your personal assistant and your second-in-command had set up, together, companies in Panama, and trusts in New Zealand to shelter them, to take massive backhanders from other corporations with which your corporation deals, what would your reaction be?

You would go berserk. You would fire them on the spot. You would probably have to be physically restrained from decking them, and then you would go to the Police, unless you decided that reaching a settlement to avoid public embarrassment for the corporation would be wiser. But either way, they would be made to go.

The one thing you would not do is defend them, keep them on, and make sure that at least one of them is put into a powerful position in a sister corporation too, increasing the scope of, nature of and opportunities for backhanders, kickbacks and bribes.

And there you have your answer.

Joseph Muscat with Juan Carlos Varela, president of Panama.