Now that the FIAU reports have been leaked to the public, the government is trying to claim they’re fake

Yesterday’s shocking news about the further deterioration of the rule of law in Malta: the Finance Minister, who is the minister responsible for the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, answered a journalist who said that the FIAU reports into the activities of Keith Schembri & co were leaked because the police had sat on them for a year and failed to act, by saying: “Were those reports written to be leaked?”

This is so outrageous that I can’t think where to begin ripping it apart. He is a minister of the government. More specifically, he is the Finance Minister. He should be shoring up public and institutional confidence in the state’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, and not undermining it to protect his corrupt colleagues who are heavily protected enough already.

That the Finance Minister, of all people, should seek to plant doubt in people’s minds by suggesting that the reports of serious investigations “were written to be leaked” – in other words, they are fake – is so unbelievable that anywhere else in the civilised world it would warrant his immediate resignation. I am completely taken aback that Edward Scicluna would choose to go down this mad road in defence of two or three colleagues who he knows are breaking the law. If he has somehow adjusted his conscience by convincing himself that they have not broken any laws, he must have jumped through plenty of mental hoops to get there.

Konrad ‘Panama’ Mizzi (left), the new Minister for Tourism and for the sale of Air Malta to the Chinese, with the Finance Minister, Edward Scicluna.