Point 1: The safe in the kitchen. The documents were taken in March last year.

Saviour Balzan of Malta Today tweeted yesterday evening that there is no safe in the kitchen at Pilatus Bank, and he can confirm this.

First off, we have to ask what Balzan was doing in the kitchen at that particular bank, but until he tells us, we shouldn’t reach any conclusions. They may have invited him in to take a look for journalistic purposes because of this story.

There may well be no safe in the kitchen at Pilatus Bank now, when Balzan got a look at the room, but he seems to have reached the unwise conclusion that because the documents reached the press now then they were also taken from the safe now.

They were not. The documents that were taken from Pilatus Bank, the text of which I published in transcript yesterday evening, were taken from the bank in March last year when this website had begun to break the stories about Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri and their companies in Panama.

At that point, nobody except the government-level co-conspirators directly involved knew about Egrant Inc, the third company, because that information emerged from the worldwide publication of the Panama Papers in the first week of April.

When the documents were taken, they were taken not because of the significance of the name of Egrant Inc, which back then would have been just another offshore company registered to the San Gwann offices of Brian Tonna/Nexia BT/Mossack Fonseca Malta. They were taken because of the significance of Mrs Muscat’s name.

And when they were taken, more than a year ago, the safe was in the kitchen and – as I have reported already – had been moved from the CEO’s office. If Saviour Balzan didn’t find it in the kitchen 13 months later, it is quite obvious that it was moved out again.

The Labour Party and its trolls like to mock me for having been trained as an archaeologist rather than studying journalism at the university. But the advantages of having trained for four years in that rigorous discipline, which shape the mind to focus first on the timeline and to avoid routes along arguments from silence and arguments from the absence of evidence, are clear.

And the Labour Party’s official media are now clutching at straws and reporting on Saviour Balzan’s tweet. If anything, they should have taken the initiative of asking to see the bank’s kitchen for themselves, and Balzan should have asked whether the safe was ever, at any point, in the kitchen.

This is a massive story, and instinct – a woman’s natural instinct and my professional instinct – tells me that we have only just begun to uncover the tip of a giant iceberg of corruption and Azerbaijan/Malta sleaze and money-laundering, that it is not straightforward, and that one or two of the co-conspirators – Tonna, Schembri, Muscat and Mizzi – may even be cheating and defrauding, possibly even blackmailing, each other.

We who work in the independent media need to remember at times of great crisis like this – and make no mistake, this is a crisis – that we are all on the same side and that corrupt politicians are on the other side. It is our job and our duty to go after them and not after each other.