We should be asking now: what is Muscat going to give Gaffarena in return for damaging Joe Cassar?

Knowledge of human nature and knowledge of politics need to dovetail on assessing what happened yesterday. You can’t just take that story in a vacuum.

There is no business operator of the scale and sort of Joe Gaffarena – definitely no corrupt operator who survives by keeping his options open – who is going to stick his neck out and reveal information that will damage a former cabinet minister and the political party of which he forms part, thereby burning his bridges permanently with what is definitely, at some point, going to be a future government.

So the question we should all be asking now – journalists, people in the street, the Opposition, even members of the government and its supporters who are decent and disgusted by what is happening – is this:

What is Joe Gaffarena going to get in return for doing Joseph Muscat a favour and knifing Joe Cassar by revealing information that, in his position, he would ordinarily be at great pains to conceal to protect himself and his relationship with the future government?

He did not do it for nothing. He did not do it out of spite and revenge, because from what I can gather, he does not feel spiteful or vengeful towards Cassar and, reading between the lines of what the Opposition leader said yesterday, I rather suspect that he may even have been one of his patients (Cassar is a psychiatrist).

We will never know that for sure unless Gaffarena says so himself, because Cassar is barred by the rules of professional practice from revealing who his patients are.

I think Gaffarena revealed that information through the Labour Party for one reason, and one reason alone: in return for the promise of something by this government. Now we need to keep our eyes open to find out what he was promised in return.

At least the government didn’t have the gall to shove that corrupt schmuck in our faces as some kind of noble ‘whistleblower’ as he did with that other contractor in Gozo, who ‘whistleblew’ quite obviously in return for the promise of payment for the supposedly corrupt jobs he carried out and which are the very subject of the ongoing prosecution of a former minister’s husband.

By spilling the beans on Joe Cassar, Joe Gaffarena has done Joseph Muscat a favour at a time when his son Marco (pictured) is facing sanctions for illegal dealing in the granting of government property through the Lands Department.