…or so he thinks. There is one former minister , who was a member of the Muscat Cabinet, which was found to be jointly and severally guilty of the state of affairs in Malta that led to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and who was a good friend and close collaborator of Joseph Muscat when they were both MEPs in Brussels, who thinks he bears no guilt.

Everybody knows that he is as guilty as any and all of the other ministers of that famously infamous cabinet. That he, with all his academic titles – professorship too – a title so wisely used by Joseph Muscat to give credence to the outside world of proficiency in economics and finance, will not get away however much he slips and slides like the proverbial slippery eel. Grey-listing , multiple scandalous sales of national assets and the greatest deficit ever under his watch and now a court decision declaring the Vitals deal to be a fraudulent act.

Professor, you should know that nobody believes you, nor do we accept your excuses each time you are faced with accusations or demands for your resignation. You, who studied with us in the seventies under Father Peter Serracino Inglott at the RUM of the time, learning moral rectitude, should know better. You do. But your greed for the €100,000 plus that you earned in Brussels and which you were promised to retain were you to join Joseph Muscat in his diabolical plan to take over Malta and share the spoils of selling it out with his close political and business buddies, has blinded you and still does.

You and your ministry were statutorily responsible for procurement rules and the authorisation of all payments where monies were paid out from the Maltese treasury during your time in office..Yes, with the ignominious sales of European passports you did rake in cash to the Maltese coffers without any shame, so blatantly breaching the MEP oath of office to uphold the European values.

Cabinet leaks reported in The Times indicated that you and all other Cabinet members knew of and signed off the Stewart €100 million penalty agreement.

The Vitals deal, the Montenegro windfarm, the Electrogas deals and the government guarantee for their financiers were signed off by you. The Australia House, the Fortina waterfront robbery in Tigné, the direct orders for friends of Ian Borg to construct unnecessary roads and flyovers were all signed off by you. The FIAU reports under the first honest directors who resigned when they were overruled in their eagerness to control the flood of money launderers that you so loved to attract to Malta were all stopped by you

While all Ministers in the Muscat administration were complicit in these misdeeds by virtue of their silence, all this happened under your watch as Minister of Finance and keeper of the national purse.

If there was a kitchen cabinet you were the “sous chef” or the plate and dish-washer and as such you were as much in the kitchen as the pseudo Michelin chef Muscat  and the shadow chef Schembri. The head waiter was Konrad and the chucker out and bouncer was Cardona. Owen’s job was sweeping the floor and throwing away the flowers and candles each evening.

Now that the courts have declared the Vitals deal to have been fraudulent and have annulled it, it is possible that those involved in this deal on both the seller’s side, i.e., the government of Malta as represented by the Cabinet of ministers of the times, as well as those involved in organizing the pre-arranged tender process and the fixed evaluation of the bidders will be brought to justice and pay back the losses that the Maltese population has suffered as a result of their wrongdoings.

Yet , dear Professor, you got stuck with your €100,000 – pathetic – while the others got away with millions.

Muscat’s cabinet is guilty of robbing Malta and the Maltese citizens. Even your taxation models that grant to foreigners, who come to live in Malta to “attaparsi” retire or who set up local holding companies in Malta, such low tax rates that it is stomach-churning for the normal Maltese citizens and businesses who pay the full rates of tax as they live side by side by these foreigners.

It is unfair, probably illegal in the larger scheme of things as the  article in the FT Wealth magazine of September 2021 points out, that normal people are forced to pay 30-50% tax whilst wealthy tax avoiders who choose grey-listed Malta to seat their grey behinds and spend their tax- avoided wealth earned by avoiding paying taxes in their countries, thanks to you, are allowed to launder their wealth to an almost zero per cent rate of tax in Grey Malta. It’s slowly but surely turning black.

Foreigners are most welcome as long as they are treated as we locals are. Thank you for all you have done for our beloved country.  As Minister of Finance, you presided over Malta’s gravitation towards our shameful grey-listing; now as Governor of the Central Bank you are undoubtedly viewed as a continuing cause of the perpetuation of this sad state of affairs.