The Health & Energy Minister has no legal source of income on which to avoid or even evade tax

Konrad Mizzi, the Health & Energy Minister who is currently embroiled in Panamagate, has no legal source of income on which to avoid or even evade tax, let alone a legal source of income of the magnitude required to justify a company in a (blacklisted) offshore tax haven notorious for its stone-wall secrecy.

It therefore follows logically that the source of that income is illegal and that the crime we are looking at here is money-laundering and not mere tax evasion. The penalties for money-laundering are extremely harsh, carry a prison sentence, and are harsher still when you are a person who holds high public office and have committed a crime you are in duty bound to prevent. The penalty includes the automatic confiscation of all assets, which is impossible if those assets are held in a secretive company, in a secretive jurisdiction, and that company is contained in a holding vehicle called a trust in yet another secretive jurisdiction.

The way to drive this point home – that he has no legal source of income to justify it – is to get hold of his income tax returns, which only newspaper editors AND MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT are legally empowered to do under the Income Tax Management Act (not under the Press Act). Under Maltese law, married couples cannot file separate income tax returns even if they have separate estates. So Mizzi’s tax returns will also contain his wife’s income, and that means newspapers will have immediate access – in one fell swoop – to the total declared income for what Mizzi is now calling “my family’s income” (as though two children in primary school have an income of their own).

Somebody – either a newspaper editor or a member of parliament from the Opposition – do it, and please do it now. It is a pressing and urgent matter of public interest. That is exactly why this clause in the law exists. Use it.