BREAKING/Confirmation that election date was decided in March: www.laqwazmien.com was registered on 7 April

For the last month I have tried in vain to break through the concrete wall of popular conviction – including the conviction of the European press – that Joseph Muscat called the general election in response to the Egrant Inc story which this website broke on 20 April.

He did not. And I knew he did not because in early April plans for the general election were already so far advanced that word was leaking out to me from producers of campaign collateral and others who had been commissioned to work on materials necessary for the election itself.

At least one month before the Egrant Inc story broke, which means somewhere around the middle of March, Muscat had planned already to call the general election for between 27 May and 17 June. Not only did he decide on the general election in March, but the Labour Party already had its campaign slogan by the first week of April. This is, in fact, how I confirmed beyond doubt that the election date was decided in March and that the brainstorming for a campaign slogan was done and dusted by the beginning of April: www.laqwazmien.com was registered on 7 April.

The website is not used as a separate domain, but takes you straight to www.josephmuscat.com, which is the Labour Party’s campaign website.

This fits with the fact that lawyers working for Henley & Partners wrote to me on 20 March to take down “offensive” posts and comments about Henley and the sale of Maltese citizenship, and a few days later when I asked Christian Kalin, Henley’s CEO, why they are doing this now after three years of silence, he responded that there is going to be a general election. I understood the significance of his response only in retrospect, thinking at the time that he was talking about several months ahead.

But he wasn’t. Henley & Partners’ Christian Kalin had been briefed by the Prime Minister about the general election date when he took his decision in March.

The bottom line is this: you can’t argue with the date of a domain registration for a campaign slogan. It’s incontrovertible: www.laqwazmien.com was registered on 7 April.

And this brings me right back to the question I have been asking all along, with no sign of an answer in sight: What drove Muscat to call a general election after just four years in power? We need to know the answer, because whatever it is, it’s crucial.

Whatever it is, it’s bad enough to have driven Muscat to take drastic action just two months into Malta’s much-vaunted presidency of the EU Council. They opened with massive fanfare and celebrations in January, something cracked in February, and in March he decided to call a general election.

It is now more imperative than ever that we find out what cracked in February – or rather, what news Muscat got in February that told him something would crack hugely in June or July.