Saviour Balzan/Keith Schembri: the morning after the 1am phone-call

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, rang Saviour Balzan at around 1am on the 21st (that was the night between Thursday and Friday). I had broken the Egrant Inc/Michelle Muscat story a few hours earlier, and the media were on fire. My story included the detail that the documents were in a safe in the kitchen at Pilatus Bank.

On the morning of the 21st, Balzan tweeted that he can confirm there is “no safe in the kitchen”. We wondered how he could possibly even know that, let alone “confirm” it. Now we have a clearer idea that he knew nothing of the sort, except what his close friend Keith Schembri had told him at night.

Now here’s something I should have reported before, but forgot to do. After Balzan tweeted that, somebody who works for a services company got in touch with me immediately, to say that the last time he saw it, the safe was most definitely in the kitchen.

I knew that already, of course.