GUEST POST/This is decency vs corruption on a massive, putrid scale

By Dire Straits

On 2nd March last year, as Malta was reeling under the shock of Daphne’s revelations about the hidden money-laundering vehicles of our rulers, I wrote a guest post for this website in which I addressed Labour officials directly.

While the government remains in stunned silence you still have a brief chance to emerge on the right side of history. Your party is sustaining massive damage that could last a generation. Muscat convinced much of the electorate that the Labour Party had learned the error of its previous ways.

The electorate won’t make that mistake again for a long time. Your party will need to be rebuilt around the people who stood up NOW for what is right.

To their eternal shame, no-one broke ranks. Like a huddled mass of rats more scared of the stormy waters around them than their rotten, sinking ship, they stuck together hoping to ride out the storm.
They will never live down that failure to stand up for what is right. But it turns out they have another chance.

Yesterday, Joseph Muscat made an error that has doomed him irrevocably. He had a chance to prove Daphne wrong – get that bank sealed up, have the police open the safe (obviously, having removed the incriminating documents first) and prove that the documents Daphne has described were not there.

He did not do this – and instead, we all saw evidence being carted away in the dark of night while Muscat’s pet Police Commissioner enjoyed a jolly fenkata in Mgarr.

That chance will never return – he allowed possible evidence to be removed, and whatever happens next he can never live that down. These are images are now seared into the national consciousness.

He is now a disgraced, lame duck Prime Minister. But how the end game plays out is crucial. As was clear already last year, the Labour Party will need to be rebuilt around people untarnished by this sorry mess. I’m not sure there is anyone still in the Labour Party who fits that description, but anyone in any position of influence who does not speak out clearly today certainly does not.

For goodness sake, this is way beyond Labour vs Nationalists. This is decency vs corruption on a massive, putrid scale.

Joseph Muscat visiting Ilham Aliyev, ruler of Azerbaijan, in his Baku palace in December 2014, when he sneaked over there without telling the Maltese public or the press.