After attacking the Pilatus Bank whistleblower’s credibility, the Prime Minister flies home in a private jet with Cyrus Engerer

The Prime Minister gave an on-camera interview to his dog-on-a-leash TVM yesterday evening, saying that he is very pleased that a whistle-blower has come forward with information about Pilatus Bank, and he won’t pass judgement on her even though she has been charged with fraud, forgery and making false reports.

This was so unacceptable that I don’t quite know where to begin. In a proper democracy, why this is wrong shouldn’t have to be explained, but then in a proper democracy, Muscat would have long since stepped down or been forced to do so by his colleagues.

The Prime Minister should never attack a whistle-blower. He should especially not attack a whistle-blower in an inquiry which he himself has ordered, into matters which directly affect him and his closest associates.

The background to his “I won’t say anything about her, but…” statement is that his closest aides have been orchestrating a campaign against her since it became known that she volunteered to testify before the inquiring magistrate on Friday.

Fraud: They make it sound as though she defrauded the bank of large sums of money, but the facts are explained in an interview in The Malta Independent today. We’re talking here of flight tickets that cost a few hundred euros, which she bought on the Seyed Ali Sadr Hasheminejad’s instructions using the company credit card, and for which the bank filed a retaliatory police report four months after she left their employment, when she was still chasing them for the money they owed her. The police raised a warrant for her arrest on the strength of this report, and detained her for interrogation, then charged her on the basis of Hasheminejad’s denial that he had told her to buy them.

Forgery of documents: There are no such charges, but it is important for the Prime Minister to throw this into the mix for reasons that will be obvious.

Making false reports: After she was released from detention, she filed a report with the police saying that she had been ill-treated while under arrest. The police held an internal inquiry and found that she was not ill-treated. Definitions of ill-treatment differ, and the police are tend to be oblivious to how stressed and threatened people feel when they are picked up under arrest, carted to Police HQ and detained for interrogation. What is normal to the police is not normal to the detainee. Because they found that she had not been ill-treated, it therefore followed that her report was “false”.

After he gave his interview to TVM, casting doubt on the integrity of the whistle-blower because of her “fraud” charges, Muscat was chauffeured to Brussels airport, where he climbed into a private jet operated by Vistajet – the same company which flew a “ferry flight” so mysteriously from Malta to Dubai and Baku in the early hours of Friday morning last week – and was flown back cosily with his beloved Cyrus Engerer, whose conviction and two-and-a-half year prison sentence on serious charges were confirmed by the Appeals Court.

Crooks Convention: Cyrus Engerer, convicted on serious charges and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, confirmed by the Appeals Court, welcomes the Prime Minister as he comes down off a private jet in Brussels. Engerer flew back with the PM in the same jet.