Ninu Zammit should tell us how much he hid from his prime minister, parliament and the Maltese public

The fact that Ninu Zammit had an account at HSBC Geneva before 2007 – by his own admission last Saturday – means that all his account details are right there in the Swiss Leaks database which is 100% accessible to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Le Monde, The Guardian, BBC Panorama and other ICIJ media partners around the world.

The database is not generally accessible, but the ICIJ and its media partners have full access.

This means that at some point, the information is going to emerge.

Ninu Zammit should have the common decency – now, when it’s too late – to say exactly how much he hid from his cabinet colleagues, parliament, the taxman and the Maltese public whose votes he chased, before the press does it for him.

His thinking now is probably that he doesn’t give a monkey’s cuss because he’s not in politics anymore and there’s no political price to be paid for him personally (people like that always think in terms of what it pays them to do personally).

He’s probably patting himself on the back and really pleased with himself for having pulled it off: hiding an inordinate amount of might actually be ill-gotten gains, for all these years, concluding his long political career and then getting an amnesty from the incoming Labour government.

But there is a political price to be paid for the government that gave him that amnesty if the truth emerges in the media before it emerges from Ninu Zammit himself.

The government has now conveniently placed itself in the unique position of being unable – at law – to tell the public how much Zammit hid precisely because it gave him that amnesty. By making Zammit’s concealed money a tax matter which it dealt with or is dealing with, the privacy laws come into play.

The law precludes the government and the tax authorities from revealing any information connected with any individual’s tax affairs. And this is a good thing. There are only very specific and tightly regulated exceptions to this: when the Speaker accedes to requests from editors for the income tax returns of members of parliament only, for example.

Ninu Zammit’s income tax returns can therefore be obtained by formally petitioning the Speaker, but they will only say how much he declared, when what we need to know is what he hid.