The Prime Minister says he has “nothing to hide”

When speaking to the press (unshaven and distracted) in Valletta alongside Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, the Prime Minister said “We welcome the European Parliament’s Panama Papers Committee. We have nothing to hide.” So he’ll be telling us who owns Egrant Inc, then.

But seriously, nothing to hide? Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri still have everything but the names of their companies and trusts so firmly hidden that we will never know exactly what they have concealed and where. And the owner of the third company set up in concert with theirs is still completely hidden, though there is one very obvious suspect.

Now it is not only Keith Schembri’s complicated tangle of ‘Russian dolls’ offshore companies which are hidden in the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Panama, but also Schembri himself. The last time he was seen on official business with the Prime Minister to whom he is chief of staff, out in public before the media, was back in September, when they announced that deal with Crane Currency. No journalist has seen him since, and that was two and a half months ago.

If I hadn’t broken the news that he is seriously ill, what was the Prime Minister planning to do, exactly? How was he planning to explain his chief of staff’s disappearance from public view and to hide his illness until the inevitable? These are Joe Stalin tactics. Maybe they were thinking of wheeling a Keith Schembri waxwork up to one of the windows at the Office of the Prime Minister, to wave at us occasionally and throw cookies at the hungrier ones.

These people are unbelievable. And if the Prime Minister is struggling to hold it together – he can barely speak coherently nowadays and is frequently still zoning out or looking blank – he can at least try to pretend by getting a shave before he faces the cameras. He’s beginning to look like some finance man who’s about to snap in a high pressure job and will shortly be found in some borrowed luxury flat with a couple of taped-down escort girls, 10 bottles of whisky and five tubs of uppers and downers, with a knife or a gun figuring somewhere in the equation. Which might not be a bad thing, because after all, Chris Cardona needs company.