There is something which seems to have escaped the public mind, namely the reasons why the candidacy of Robert Abela was heavily backed by his disgraced predecessor, Joseph Muscat to take over the job of prime minister.

In recent years and up to the time he was elected to parliament, Abela was Muscat’s well paid legal adviser sitting on a hefty monthly retainer... when not otherwise working weekends as legal adviser to the Planning Authority on a second hefty retainer, naturally all paid by us.  

So what? 

You might say that is an element of continuity which would have otherwise been lost.

You might argue how fortunate to have someone new who already knows all the ins and outs of the great deals done under the Rolex watch of the old boss.

Abela, as the new broom, could sooner move into the top job without the usual time-wasting process of getting to grips by having to rely solely upon the hearsay of civil servants.

Wrong.

Lawyers, like priests, owe their clients absolute professional confidentiality up to their last bad breath on earth, so that anything passed in confidence to them cannot be directly or indirectly exposed by them.

It is a fact and it is known for lawyers to lie to defeat anyone who tries, without a legitimate reason, to trick them into breaching that confidentiality.

For example, if a suspecting wife telephones a divorce lawyer and asks him whether her husband has not yet already left his law office, the lawyer would otherwise give the game away if he answered her that he was “bound by confidence not to say”.

Muscat knew and understood the importance of professional secrecy when it came to his lawyers and his accountants. He knew that between Chris Fearne and Abela, the choice had to be Abela. 

Fearne may keep confidential medical data about Muscat’s knee joints but the lawyers and accountants in Castille would have to keep secret what they knew about the scores of underhand negotiations that Muscat’s business mates were making with an eye to filling up secret offshore piggy banks.

So, what could serve Muscat better than having a bulletproof successor who was bound by law and professional ethics not to reveal confidential information received during the period of their client-lawyer relationship?

Lawyers, like priests, owe their clients absolute professional confidentiality up to their last bad breath on earth- Eddie Aquilina

And what could, albeit indirectly, also serve and protect Muscat’s close associates among whom were Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri?

Now one might say that Abela was not necessarily informed about the back door financials or the hidden kickbacks, nor was he aware that his client’s chief of staff  and star minister had already paid Karl Cini to travel to Panama to set up three offshore companies.

But, in April 2016, Abela got to know, like we all got to know, that Muscat, his PM client, was showing no courage in sacking the owners of Tillgate and Hearnville and, strangely,  showed no interest at all in asking them as to the identity of the elusive Egrant.

One would guess he was in a better position than the ordinary citizen to join the dots of what was going down with deals like the Electrogas swindle and the Mozura windfarm rip-off. Abela is no naïve victim of circumstance, unlike his former client.

Was it mere coincidence that in his only Times of Malta interview in the three years since being chosen to run Castille, Abela recently used Fearne as a hypothetical revolving door case of a minister who would retire from politics and therefore be able to return to earning a living as a medical practitioner?

Sigmund Freud would say it was not.

So, there it is. Good advice to any shady CEO of a public owned company caught with one’s pants down.

Upon a forced retirement try and get replaced by your own legal adviser rather than by your own deputy manager.