No fundamentally decent person can excuse this government’s behaviour

Former Labour Party candidate Mark Sammut is right: his (late) father probably would have collapsed if he had lived to see a Labour government in which the Prime Minister’s de facto second-in-command had, together with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, set up secret companies in Panama enclosed for further impenetrability by trusts in New Zealand, just a few days after coming to power.

I had my differences with Frans Sammut – very public differences when he was a consultant to Prime Minister Alfred Sant and afterwards – but I have to admit that he was a fundamentally honest man. I can’t imagine him ever condoning anything like that or trying to excuse it or brush it off as though it were somehow normal.

He would have seen it for the stark evidence of corrupt crookery that it is.

The Panama scandal has divided Malta not between ‘Nationalist’ and ‘Labour’ but between ‘fundamentally dishonest’ and ‘fundamentally honest’, and those who are informed and those who are uninformed. You can excuse a teenage shop-girl or forklift driver for not understanding the precise significance of 1. a secret company in impenetrable Panama, with the ultimate beneficial owner hidden behind a complicated structure of nominees, and 2. the two key figures closest to the Prime Minister setting them up, together with a ‘spare’ one for an unnamed person who, if common sense is used, just has to be the Prime Minister himself.

But you can’t excuse business operators and Malta’s large shoal of sharks for claiming not to understand the significance or pretending that it’s normal. Of course they understand the significance, and fully. And of course they know why those companies were set up. They’re just pretending otherwise because it suits them, and because they are dishonest themselves.

Some months after the Panama scandal broke last February, I was approached at a party by a very prominent business operator who had been rabid in his support of Joseph Muscat until early this year. “Well done for that story; the corruption is shocking. You can smell it in the air. What a shame.”

I fought back the ungracious urge to point out that he’d voted for them and encouraged others to do likewise, when that outfit was transparently corrupt at the outset and even I (let alone somebody as sharp as he is) could see that the main reason they were gagging to get into power was to smash-and-grab-raid the shop. And that the reason they were so angry and resentful towards the Nationalists in government was because they thought they were doing the same thing and were actually jealous.

It didn’t take much psychology to work that one out. You could see it on their faces and in everything they said and did. But my sharp-shark acquaintance voted Labour on the basis that Muscat is fabulous and Tonio Fenech had a clock. The trouble with being well brought up is that civility wins out when it shouldn’t – because that really was the time and place for a couple of sharp remarks.