Keith Schembri’s fate is tied to the prime minister’s in a way that Mizzi’s is not. It is doubly problematic that the prime minister’s own chief of staff, no stranger to the world of offshore, could have encouraged Mizzi to select this option. This alone is an effrontery to the civility of the taxpayer’s democracy that is Malta. He is an elected Member of Parliament, granted a role in the country’s executive, which he placed under suspicion the minute he chose an offshore structure to hide his beneficial ownership and minimise his tax exposure. He too worships at the altar of aspiration, as if making money any which way it has to be done is justifiable in itself, as long as it’s legal.īut Mizzi’s problem is a clear one that has to be seen for what it was from the start. The American University of Malta may be the boost his beautiful south needs, but Muscat felt unmoved at taking public land so blithely away from the citizens who own it, to be regaled to foreign merchants hustling for a dime from the children of the global rich. The Individual Investor Programme may be the ultimate money-spinner, but Muscat commoditised Maltese citizenship without batting an eyelid.
Never has he shied away from promoting rent-seeking elites as long as the private sector could carry out its basic job of making money, without any hassle. That Muscat has come at an inevitable crossroads in his political project is, also, in part, his responsibility. Under Sant he swore loyalty to the uninspiring ‘partnership’ and campaigned against the EU, only to persevere in becoming an MEP and later to sit at the European Council’s table he evolved from an opponent of gay adoptions, to now call for gay marriages he made shrewd calculations for political gain that in the process cost him precious votes from liberal pockets, namely on environment, on migration, and most regretfully, on good governance. Muscat is not simply a successful social democrat, but his political cherry-picking over the years is a result of his pragmatic approach to politics. Or he could take a long, hard look at the country he claims his party has changed, and venture into the future of the project he set out on three years ago. He can look away now, heed party delegates who slobber on the conference podium seeking their own electoral fortunes, and cast away all pretensions at being an agent of change. Now, it seems, that bloodletting has not been enough.īut if there was a test of leadership for the man whose party delegates vaunt as the template leader for European social democracy, making the cut that hurts the most, now, is that test. Muscat may be a beginner in the art of statehood – Panamagate, in his third year, sounds like a third strike too early after Café Premier and the Gafferena scandal – and his ‘best Cabinet ever’ has shed much blood already. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is walled in an echo chamber that is elbowing out the little wise counsel that there is inside Castille, calling on to him to heed the sound of ‘common decency’: a minister of the state cannot use offshore as a way of avoiding tax on his assets.
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