Noddy can’t possibly be serious
It is quite clear now that the only members of the cabinet who are prepared to actively stick up for the Triad are the Justice Minister and the Minister for the Economy, Owen Bonnici and Chris Cardona. (Deborah Schembri is a parliamentary secretary and is not, strictly speaking, a cabinet member though parliamentary secretaries attend cabinet meetings.)
Bonnici told the press this morning that Konrad Mizzi is “politically naïve” – which begs the question of why a naïve man would be put in charge of the health and energy portfolios under which almost all of Malta’s biggest contracts have been negotiated and signed.
The Justice Minister also said that his cabinet colleague had declared all his assets in the “draft” declaration which only the Prime Minister seems to have seen. He did not see it himself, he said (obviously not, because it never existed, though it will now be conjured up).
Noddy – a lawyer by training and a minister of justice – also said that Konrad Mizzi’s set-up in Panama and New Zealand is justified because he is married to a Chinese woman and owns a house (or is it a flat?) in England.
He said that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, “is a successful businessman” who has “every right to decide how to manage his estate”.
When he made him his chief of staff in March 2013, the Prime Minister said that Schembri had given up all his directorships, suggesting that he was no longer involved in the management of his assets though he remained a shareholder of his business companies. That is almost irrelevant to the point, however – the chief of staff to the Prime Minister of a European Union member state should not have offshore, secret companies in the British Virgin Islands and Panama, nor a secret trust in New Zealand.
P.S. Noddy also needs to be taught to pronounce ‘hindsight’. Here is a helpful video.
