Phyllis Muscat: we haven’t considered her at all

As usual, we overlook the women. Sai Mizzi has been passed over completely in this saga even though she’s a politically exposed person in her own right and directly implicated in the Panama Papers fall-out. We’re treating her as The Wife, when in reality she is The Government Envoy.

This country’s attitude to women manifests itself even in these issues.

Today a chance conversation with somebody got me thinking: Phyllis Muscat. How in heaven’s name did we not consider her? She is the obvious other member of the tight wad of conspirators: Brian Tonna, Karl Cini, Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Adrian Hillman and Konrad Mizzi.

She is extremely close to both Joseph Muscat and Schembri. She travels on family holidays with the Prime Minister, and owns a company – Grigal Films – with his chief of staff. She even lives near him on the Santa Marija Estate in Mellieha and they visit each other’s houses. She takes the Prime Minister and his wife and children out on her boat in the summer. Brian Tonna and Nexia BT audit her companies, and she made Adrian Hillman chairman of the Commonwealth Business Forum 2015.

It seemed an inexplicable decision to many back then – why would that bunch of Laburisti at the epicentre of government power pick the chairman of the Allied Newspaper Group for that plum networking position and pay him a handsome sum for doing nothing much? What was the relationship between them? Why on earth did the newspaper group chairman think it a good idea to get involved in something like that when his newspapers were meant to be reporting independently on it?

Those of us who had a pretty good idea what Keith Schembri and Hillman were up to in terms of corruption, in connection with Progress Press/Allied Newspapers, knew that the link between Hillman and Phyllis Muscat was in fact the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

But as I said, we overlooked Phyllis Muscat (because she’s a woman), but I rather suspect that at some point before long we’re going to find her somewhere in this scandalous offshore network, and we’ll probably find her fronting for the one she mothers, the Prime Minister.

I’ll stop there for now.

Phyllis Muscat with Keith Schembri