Joseph Muscat speaks brazenly at Commonwealth conference on tackling corruption

You can watch the webcast here.

In the middle of a swirl of scandal so thick that we can no longer see daylight, the Prime Minister has flown to London to speak at a conference called Tackling Corruption Together, which is organised by the Commonwealth, Transparency International, Thomson Reuters, the One Campaign, and the Bteam.

He was the first person to speak. He said that Malta is small (which should make it easier to control corruption, but there you go) but it is “trying its best to see that the corruption problem is defeated”. He then went on to list the various ways in which his government is defeating corruption:

1. the lifting of time-barring in cases involving politicians and corruption;

2. the Whistleblower Act, which protects whistleblowers rather than politicians;

3. the Party Financing Act.

Politicians can now be prosecuted at any time for corruption, he said, even decades down the line (but of course, they can’t be prosecuted immediately if their names are Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri and they’re in power).

And with the Whistleblower Act, he said, “people feel free to point fingers”. Ah, so that would be why nobody is using the phone for text messaging or calls anymore, and WhatsApp has seen a massive increase in traffic. And that’s why nobody even criticises the government in public, let alone points fingers. They give us a Whistleblower Act so that we can point fingers, and then they create an environment of fear and intimidation or coercion so that nobody points them.

And then Muscat said that “donations to political parties are now controlled”. This from the man with the massive war chest filled by Beijing, Baku, the members of the Malta Developers Association and various people in and out of the power station. And then, of course, there are all those companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands, waiting to be populated.

And wait for the final words: “My government is giving a strong signal to the general public that we are trying to tackle the problem”.

Cue the canned laughter. I mean, really, what a nerve he’s got. And see how bad-tempered he looks.