There was a brief flutter of excitement yesterday when news sites reported that Adrian Delia had asked for an urgent meeting with President George Vella.
The Leader of the Opposition had just been named by Keith Schembri that morning and, if my experience is anything to go by, people were hanging on to every update on the live blogs on the news portals with minute by minute updates about what was going on in court. Then the news that Adrian Delia had urgently asked to meet the head of state got jumbled inside the story about what Keith Schembri was saying about him.
It turned out Adrian Delia was not resigning. He was just being an ordinary vanilla leader of opposition, going to the president to apply pressure because of the Montenegro scandal. He was lamenting the damage to Malta’s reputation and the need for institutions to look alive. He was asking the president to do all he can to get the institutions to act so that this country can start healing and our reputation in the eyes of the world can start improving.
That’s all very well, but when we saw Adrian Delia drive out of San Anton, what he said was not what some would have been hoping for.
No doubt, Keith Schembri fools no one. The reference in his testimony to Adrian Delia and his relationship with Yorgen Fenech is entirely irrelevant to the case of the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. All that has ever been said so far, including what Keith Schembri said yesterday, has no equivalency to the Panama scandal, the 17 Black fraud, the Montenegro corruption, and to top all this off the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
This hunt for the mote in the PN’s eye to distract from the beam in Labour’s serves only one purpose: to generate enough smoke for Keith Schembri and Joseph Muscat to sneak out of the battlefield and have a laugh watching us drowning in mutual recriminations.
That doesn’t mean the PN can be allowed to go around ignoring the mote in its eye. Adrian Delia’s statement from last week, reacting to Melvyn Theuma’s testimony on the same subject, does not address what he stands accused of here. Nor does Pierre Portelli’s affidavit published yesterday.
What they said answers some question, but not the one that is being asked.
Adrian Delia spouted the old trope that he’s being confronted by a pack of Labour Party lies conjured from thin air because of all the heat the government is under. The Labour Party is surely making a meal of the allegation that Adrian Delia solicited and accepted money from Yorgen Fenech in a time frame that possibly follows his identification as the owner of 17 Black. But that does not mean Labour is conjuring it.
Adrian Delia was acting furious with the Labour Party but he was really responding to statements by Melvyn Theuma in the dock. Melvyn Theuma is not the Labour Party. And before Melvyn Theuma said what he said on Thursday, the same allegation was made by PN MP David Thake who can hardly be accused of proximity to Labour.
Melvyn Theuma was speaking about things Yorgen Fenech had told him, and Yorgen Fenech was heard saying on recordings of his conversations taped without his knowledge.
So what Adrian Delia is saying here is that in May 2019, when he was not expecting to be arrested, Yorgen Fenech spoke into a recording device he was unaware of with the pre-meditated intent to embarrass Adrian Delia in June 2020 with the accusation of soliciting money from the owner of 17 Black.
It takes a special form of blind loyalty to accept that explanation.
Keith Schembri elaborated yesterday. And yes, of course he may have been lying, because there is much else he said that cannot be believed. He said that quite apart from the now famous ‘money to kick out David Casa’ deal, Pierre Portelli would loiter outside Yorgen Fenech’s office in Portomaso at the end of every month waiting for €20,000 in donations.
Pierre Portelli rushed to publish a statement he wrote last week denying that he received money with the attached condition that he would work to kick out David Casa.
That is an answer to some question, no doubt. But not to the question whether Pierre Portelli received for the Nationalist Party monthly donations, with or without strings attached, that by the second one would have exceeded the maximum allowed by the electoral law from a single source.
All this only helps Keith Schembri survive in the eyes of people that would support him anyway. None of it will be relevant if Keith Schembri would ever be charged for corruption and murder. ‘Everybody else was doing it,’ is hardly a credible defence. And nobody else was killing a journalist incidentally.
But the PN should take no comfort in the fact that most of us are smart enough to see through Keith Schembri’s subterfuge. We do. But we are also smart enough to see that the excuse that ‘the others are much worse than we are’ doesn’t cut it either.
There’s a beam in Labour’s eye. But if we’re to turn to someone to replace them, don’t blame us for being concerned with that bloody mote.