For the last year, the Prime Minister has been saying that there’s nothing wrong with a politician having a company in Panama

Since March last year, Prime Minister Muscat has been working overtime to convince us that there is absolutely nothing wrong with a politician starting the process to set up a company in Panama just a few days after being elected to power.

He’s been playing it cool and relaxed, telling us that he’s fine with Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s Panama companies, that Schembri is not accountable to the public, and that Mizzi was doing it to look after his family and has “subjected himself” to an audit. And that he has no reason or inclination to sack either of them because they’ve done nothing wrong.

But now that his own involvement in Panama has been discovered (not that it wasn’t obvious all along), he has become hysterical and outraged. Suddenly, it’s not OK to have a company in Panama and he’s calling urgent press conferences and threatening to sue for libel.

But Muscat is in a bit of a fix here, isn’t he. If it’s OK for his two henchmen to own companies in Panama and to have tried to keep them secret from the electorate and the Maltese authorities, why isn’t it OK for him to do the same?