I hope people understand the threatening implications – for them – of this behaviour

The Nationalist Party owes the paper supply company 99.9% owned by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, €121,000 for newsprint it bought before its printing press was closed down post March 2013.

In a fit of vengeance and reprisal because of the Panama Papers stories and the Nationalist Party’s campaigning for his removal from office, Schembri has now called in the debt by means of a judicial letter which the party’s administration received last Friday.

Yesterday, during an interview on radio, the Opposition leader said that today, Monday, he will have the cheque hand-delivered to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff at the Office of the Prime Minister, and not to Kasco’s address.

This is to drive home the point, Simon Busuttil said, that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff is still very much involved in his business. Well, of course he is. He owns 99.9% of the company. It is only people who know nothing about shares, directors and companies who lapped up the Prime Minister’s disingenuous tosh that Schembri is no longer involved because he resigned his directorship (he was replaced by his father).

The Nationalist Party should never have been buying newsprint from the man closest to Joseph Muscat, who was running the ‘enemy campaign’ and filling up the enemy war-chest. But this is exactly what happens to Maltese people: living in a claustrophobic society on a tiny island means that too many people habitually compartmentalise things and use ‘splitting’ to justify the different hats.

There are other paper suppliers, but the thing about Keith Schembri – the one which not many people outside the media business know – is that he routinely bought leverage in a variety of creative ways, either by outfitting the new homes of certain journalists and TV presenters through very good deals from his interiors shop, Loft, by becoming chummy with them, ringing them up, inviting them out, and building the wrong sort of relationship, by giving kickbacks to the managing director of Malta’s largest newspaper printing press and setting up secret offshore companies with him, or by giving very lenient payment terms. When you have trouble paying, you go to the one with the lenient payment terms, and that’s is what will have happened with the Nationalist Party.

In the last three years, that is the first debt the Nationalist Party should have got rid of. Owing the Prime Minister’s chief of staff money? I don’t think so.

Of course, there is another reason why Schembri will have called in that debt. He is now scrounging around for every last bit of LEGITIMATE money for Kasco, which has been haemorrhaging business and clients since the Panama Papers stories began to break. For reasons that should be obvious, he has lost his biggest client, Progress Press/Allied Newspapers, and that makes for a massive dent in revenue.