Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in. Keith Schembri resigned as Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff in late 2016 – he told the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry on Monday – but then the hijack occurred and Schembri was pulled back in since, apparently, he speaks Arabic.
Presumably, Martin Zammit, Malta’s leading expert on Arabic dialects, and the government’s other indispensable Arabic speaker, Neville Gafà, were unavailable.
It took Schembri another three years before he resigned. Who knew a hijack could take so long to tidy up?
Schembri presented himself as more sinned against than sinning. “Perhaps I took shortcuts but was I wrong? The country benefitted.”
Yes, I suppose – if you bracket out the reputational damage inflicted by Panamagate, the shadowy deals and suspicions of money laundering.
Schembri feels he is a victim: “I ask myself if it was all worth it but then I look at all the surpluses we got. All this talk of corruption but a corrupt government does not generate surpluses over and over.”
This would be news to several countries that have both some of the world’s largest surpluses and high levels of corruption. But Schembri is a busy man and must not be blamed for overlooking niceties.
This is, after all, a man who says he was too busy to change auditors, even after Nexia BT committed several grievous errors when trying to open a bank account for his Panama company.
He’s been too busy to keep up with the testimony of the assassination investigators. He asked why the inquiry wasn’t looking into Adrian Delia and Caruana Galizia’s charges of money laundering against him.
Maybe the judges will get round to that. But, meanwhile, they have expert testimony that the SIM cards of the alleged hitmen’s burner phones were bought in late 2016. Another two SIM cards, used to detonate the bomb, were bought in November that year. Before the assassination, they were only activated twice: on January 15, 2017 and on August 21 that year.
Caruana Galizia accused Delia of money laundering for the first time on August 24. His “two-bit blogger” speech was made in September. The second and final test between the detonators was conducted before all this.
Keith Schembri feels he is a victim
That said, I can’t honestly exclude the judges are part of a plot, organised by Jason Azzopardi, to prevent us from seeing that Delia is the Nostradamus of our time.
Anyway, let’s not let this distract us from the simple fact that all Schembri ever wanted was a quiet life which he gave up for the country’s sake.
After all, why did he set up a trust in New Zealand? Because he couldn’t trust Maltese banks anymore, after someone leaked information to the PN about a trust he held in Malta. It was Nexia BT who suggested Panama.
He knew nothing about the secret company Macbridge, which Nexia BT said would be paying him loads of money. All he had done was give Nexia BT a list of potential clients and they left out all the clients, except, that is, 17 Black, and included Macbridge out of nowhere.
Was it Schembri who advised Konrad Mizzi to open a trust in New Zealand? Karl Cini refused to tell the inquiry whether Schembri and Mizzi came to him together or separately. But we know what Mizzi told Dissett’s Reno Bugeja in March 2016:
“Did I and Mr Schembri speak? Yes, we discussed this matter. He explained his situation and how he was taking advice about a trust fund and, after this discussion, I had discussions with the same advisers about this matter and they suggested a structure for me.”
Schembri says this doesn’t mean he recommended Nexia BT or a similar financial structure to Mizzi. It means only that he told Mizzi that he didn’t trust Maltese banks anymore.
You see, Schembri has been plagued not just by fake news but also by fake grammar. Therese Comodini Cachia asked him how he could blame the inclusion of Macbridge on Nexia BT when his own press statement of April 18, 2018 stated that 17 Black and Macbridge were included in his draft business plans as potential clients.
Fake grammar! His statement merely declared Macbridge was included but not by whom. Did Nexia BT invent Macbridge? Schembri pointed out gently, so that we could all understand, that he hadn’t actually said that.
We shouldn’t feel bad at not understanding. Even Australia’s top financial journalist, Neil Chenoweth, who accused Schembri of money laundering back in 2016, was told he was confused.
Schembri operates at a high level beyond most of us. Take his gift for friendship: “There are different levels of friendship. Some I invite into the kitchen, others into the hall.”
Fenech was a friend “like many others” so, presumably did not get beyond the hall. Even so, that meant Fenech paid for part of Schembri’s medical treatment, was part of a WhatsApp threesome with Muscat and Schembri and received photos of food dishes from Schembri’s kitchen.
Why, Fenech even told Schembri of his secret company, 17 Black, and of his plans to replicate the Electrogas project in Bangladesh, two facts that the Electrogas partners deny knowledge of.
Imagine what intimacy is possible with Schembri when he considers you a close friend and not just one of many.
Which brings us to Muscat. He was told about 17 Black, Schembri says, after it was out in the media, though he’s not sure when. He didn’t think it was important, though, in April 2016, the reaction to Mizzi’s Panama company was explosive, even within Labour.
Mysteriously, when, in November 2018, Kurt Farrugia asked Schembri whether 17 Black was Fenech’s, Schembri replied: “could be”. Apparently he didn’t see the importance of telling the government’s communications chief even after it was out in the media.
The cynics will say Schembri’s testimony only makes sense once you realise that he had to deny he knows the identity of Macbridge’s owner but not throw Nexia BT under a bus (or they might retaliate). He had to provide Muscat with plausible deniability over dates but not appear to have betrayed Muscat (or he’d face the music with Labour hotheads).
Why so cynical? All he ever wanted was to serve the country. Instead, the world still laughs when his lost phone is mentioned.