If corrupt ‘Keith’ gives me a ring, I’ll tell him where his fraudster cousin is: in Dubai

Glenn Bedingfield, one of the Prime Minister’s intellectually and socially challenged aides, likes to push the myth, which he knows to be false, that I pull the communications strings at the Nationalist Party (that’s rich, coming from somebody who spent his entire life on the party payroll).

Well, today it couldn’t be more evident that I don’t. The Nationalist Party has been ordered to pay Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s corrupt chief of staff, €5,000 for publishing a story claiming that he knows where his fraudster cousin – Ryan Schembri of More Supermarkets, who fled Malta owing millions – is hiding out.

Keith Schembri says he doesn’t know where his cousin is (and quite frankly, I don’t believe him, because even I know that he’s in Dubai), and the Nationalist Party couldn’t prove that this terminal liar is lying. So the court ruled as it did.

The Nationalist Party’s reaction was to issue a statement saying that if the Prime Minister’s chief of staff had any sense of decency at all, he would have resigned months ago. If I had been pulling the strings as the Prime Minister’s zoological collection of aides likes to suggest, I would have pointed out that anybody with a sense of decency wouldn’t be laundering profits through a complicated network of secret offshore accounts in the first place, so the statement should have said instead:

As a consequence of a court ruling this morning, the Nationalist Party now owes the Prime Minister’s chief of staff €5,000. The Nationalist Party has communicated directly with Keith Schembri to ask him to which offshore account he would like to have the money transferred – Gibraltar, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands or Panama/Dubai – and for the relevant SWIFT code and IBAN number. So far, he has failed to reply.