David Lindsey’s story yesterday on The Malta Independent on Sunday throws a little more light on the darkness of the exit of Gasol from the Electrogas consortium. Jacob Borg’s story today on The Times of Malta provides some more information about the agency of Konrad Mizzi as some form of mediator between any regulator with initiative and the consortium itself.
Yesterday’s Independent report than proceeds to remind us the back-story of Gasol: how a shell company with hidden ownership leveraged a reputation it conjured from thin air to use locally borrowed money to do nothing about a major contract awarded to it by the government until it exits for undisclosed compensation.
It is a story that would be told again in the hospitals flip from VGH to Steward.
However the Electrogas story is more urgently important because it matches the time lines of huge payments made into 17 Black that documentary evidence now shoes undertook to make payments into accounts held by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.
The warning signs have been there for some time. ‘Ciccio’, you may recall, was a frequent correspondent on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog and he had provided this assessment of Gasol and its sole director way before anyone else felt they have reason to say aloud they suspected things were not quite right.
At the time Ciccio warned the local press to focus on this story. As things turned out the warning should have also gone to the police.
But even now that so much more is out in the open, the police will not move. Joseph Muscat yesterday warned us, Caudillo style, that we must respect the police no matter what we think of their decisions. When Joseph Muscat undoes the chains he has bound the police with, we might just listen to him.
