The public inquiry that Joseph Muscat’s administration resisted so vehemently has been vital in edging closer toward the truth. Politicians and political officials who would have otherwise been out of reach and unaccountable are now being put on the spot to answer the questions that so many of us have been asking for so long.

Last week, it was the ignominious Edward Scicluna whose turn it was to make a fool of himself in court. Scicluna, a senior minister in the cabinets of Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela is claiming that he was an impotent if not helpless victim of the corruption that happened under this watch.

A list of scandals was presented to Scicluna in court, from the American University of Malta, to the Montenegro scandal, the shameful Vitals deal… In a bout of irony, Scicluna decided to blame a hidden hand, a shady clique of elite lawyers and consultants led by the nefarious Joseph Muscat.

The irony is twofold. Firstly, a senior minister in a government that has fostered a reputation for gloating about its popularity and efficacy now pleads impotence.

Ministers appear to be happy to show how much work they do on taxpayer-funded adverts on their personal Facebook pages, but when it comes to answering for their inaction against corruption, they claim to be about as powerful as a dustpan in a sandstorm.

Secondly, the same Joseph Muscat who never tired of crusading against an imagined ‘establishment’ now has the same charge levelled against him by one of his own cabinet ministers. Scicluna stopped short of calling Muscat’s clique ‘the establishment’. He went for Evarist Bartolo’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ instead, presumably because of how much crime and corruption Muscat proverbially cooked up with his sous-chefs Keith Schembri, Brian Tonna, and chef de partie Konrad Mizzi.

Scicluna decided to blame a hidden hand- David Casa

Scicluna refutes that he went anywhere near the kitchen, but he didn’t step out when it got too hot, either, whereas he could have resigned instead of endorsing crooks. By his own admission, he let his greed guide him on that.

No matter how much Scicluna claims to have been detached from his colleagues’ malfeasance, the reality is that he has been and remains in the same boat as them. One hopes that Edward Scicluna has not forgotten that at present, he is subject to a criminal inquiry. A magistrate is probing the Vitals deal, or why three major hospitals in Malta were practically handed out to an outsider with a history of fraud, with no experience in healthcare, in a deal flaunting tender rules, at great cost to the taxpayer with no obvious benefit.

Scicluna passed the buck to (the repeatedly) disgraced Konrad Mizzi, and suggested that the Vitals deal was not passed through the cabinet. Perhaps the implication is that it was another one of Muscat’s culinary inventions in the kitchen cabinet, which only amounted to a complete political froġa.

All in all, Edward Scicluna’s testimony is reminiscent of scaled-down re-enactment of the banality of evil. “We have weaknesses to be addressed,” he concedes, but if not by him, then by whom? His stubborn claims of innocence that are supposed to absolve him instead make him seem more like a vacuous enabler of corruption, incompetent at best, but more likely to be complicit.

Scicluna’s claims about an uncooperative Projects Malta, the company used to fast track questionable projects bypassing scrutiny, is a case in point. Scicluna’s very own top civil servant sat on the board of Projects Malta. It is therefore bizarre and false that he claims information on the corrupt projects was out of his reach. It is far more likely that he preferred to allow taxpayers to continue being robbed blind – so long as he was not inconvenienced.

If only he had criticised Muscat and his corrupt bedfellows half as much as he did me for asking questions and demanding accountability for serious corruption.

Scicluna thinks I can influence the European Commission, but he can’t do anything about corruption happening in his own ministry. He certainly could fire FIAU officials when it pleased him. When the FIAU reports came out, he certainly sprung to action to discredit and cover up the debacle.

Any way he intends to cut it, Scicluna was the minister in the period when Malta plummeted in indexes for financial rigour, despite the consistent hard work of genuine professionals in the field. Scicluna is intent on blaming me for bad-mouthing Malta abroad. Does he also want to suggest that his own ministry was hijacked by the inner circle of the Muscat’s “lawyer-led establishment”?

It seems like years of gas-lighting campaigns are coming to a shaky end. Evidence that was dismissed as unfounded allegations are now reasons to be disappointed or betrayed, but not reasons to resign. The new trend for complicit Labour ministers is to point their finger toward Joseph Muscat and Co, against whom they claimed to harbour some frustration.

But officials like Scicluna, who have enabled corruption, seem to have forgotten a time when they were happy to discredit activists and when their only regret was that they couldn’t put us all on the gallows. Barely repentant stories about betrayal do not begin to repair the extensive damage done to our country.

David Casa is a Nationalist MEP.