Malta Finance Minister attacks Sueddeutsche Zeitung journalists, accuses them of “spreading lies”

Malta’s Finance Minister, Edward Scicluna, this morning launched an attack on journalists working for one of Germany’s most important and influential newspapers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

He accused “certain individuals, particularly in Germany” of “damaging Malta’s reputation”. He then gave a jingoistic call to arms: “As Maltese we need to defend our country against lies. Malta deserves better.”

Right now, most of us would agree with him that Malta deserves better, much better, but it wouldn’t be big articles in a German newspaper that we’d have in mind.

The Finance Minister was talking about this article. He said that it is “simply not true” that German citizens have “1,000 hidden accounts in Malta”.

Tweeting in response, Frederik Obermaier, one of the two journalists who worked on that article for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and who is also one of the two journalists who originally received the Mossack Fonseca documents from an anonymous source that later went on to become known as the Panama Papers, pointed out that the article never mentioned “accounts” but companies. He suggests that Malta’s Finance Minister may be deliberately misconstruing it.

You would expect ordinary people and even confused MPs and journalists to keep forever mixing up companies and accounts, which is why they keep referring to ‘kontijiet fil-Panama’ when what they are is ‘kumpanniji fil-Panama’. But you would fully expect an economist who is the Minister of Finance to know the difference between a company and a bank account.