Those who expected Mizzi’s resignation were wrong

I don’t like I-told-you-so moments, but those who expected the Prime Minister to announce Konrad Mizzi’s resignation could not have been more wrong and obviously so. That wasn’t a swansong speech that Mizzi gave last Thursday, and I can’t imagine how anybody could have interpreted it as such.

It was the precise opposite: a speech of defiance. So defiant, in fact, that he said: “I will be at the frontline again in 2018.” Besides which, if he intended to step down, he would have done so there and then. That was the moment for it.

But over and above that, Muscat himself has repeatedly said that he will take no action until this fictitious international audit – by a mysterious unnamed international auditing firm – is concluded. He said the same thing again after Mizzi spoke on Thursday night. So it was wrong to keep pushing the rumour that Muscat would announce Mizzi’s resignation this morning. He had made it clear already that he had no intention of doing so.

Mizzi is staying. No international audit is possible, and even if it were, the evidence published today by the Australian Review is so damning that this in itself is actionable. The Prime Minister clearly would have read it (it was published at 7am CET) before he spoke today at the Labour meeting and yet he did not even refer to it in passing.

Those three are in collusion. The press has got to start addressing that fact. Nexia BT wrote to Mossack Fonseca to set up THREE companies in Panama on 14 March 2013, three days after Muscat took his oath of office as Prime Minister of Malta on 11 March and just one day after the cabinet of government was sworn in on 13 March.