THIS MORNING/Education Minister redoubles assault on Malta Financial Services Authority chairman

And when somebody asks him sarcastically whether it’s all right for a cabinet minister to set up and own a company in Panama if it’s not all right for the Malta Financial Services Authority chairman to do whatever it is Bartolo objects to, Bartolo responds: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

As I have written already in some other post – this is completely unacceptable. No, it is not the Education Minister’s view of the situation with Bannister that is unacceptable, but that a cabinet minister is targeting, deliberate and publicly, the chairman of a state authority in this manner.

The proper place for a cabinet minister to express his views of a state authority chairman is in cabinet meetings with his colleagues. Public assaults of this nature, by a minister of the government, are totalitarian, create an atmosphere of intimidation, and shake confidence in the authority whose chairman is under fire by a minister of the government. Whatever the merits or otherwise of Joe Bannister (and I happen to be somebody who think he has been at the MFSA too long and it’s time for him to move on), this is the sort of behaviour you would expect in Beijing, but then this is bitter old Commie Bartolo, so no surprises there.

You have to wonder about his personal motivation, though: why he is doing it in public and more pertinently still, why he has chosen to target Bannister in the first place in this fashion when, as has been pointed out to him, he has been ridiculously and corruptly silent on the matter of Konrad Mizzi.

And by corrupt, I mean morally corrupt. A man of principle would have stood down rather than share a seat in in the government with men like Konrad Mizzi, Joseph Muscat and puppeteer Keith Schembri.