Joseph Muscat paints a combined narrative of being the expert in everything and simultaneously burdened with an inherent naiveté when judging those close to him. Like all confidence tricksters, it was in late adolescence that he developed a natural talent for persuading fools into believing what they wanted to hear.
Notwithstanding his super-confident smile, what always gives him away is his body language and nervous laughter.
When a journalist door-stepped him outside his rent-free gifted offices in Sa Maison, referring to the Vitals scam, Muscat’s first movement was to dismiss him summarily and turn away. You can see him then realise that ignoring the second question would make him look weak and defeated, so he returns repeatedly with feint anger and furrowed brow, using the only defence available to him – the pre-determined findings of forgery in the Egrant inquiry.
That inconclusive certificate of innocence cost the public as much as his Panama mates, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, were planning to receive from allegedly secret kickbacks in just one year from a Dubai company connected to the Electrogas and Mozura deals.
These clear signs of money laundering did not bother Muscat in the least. His handling of the breaking news that his choice private-public projects minister had set up his secret offshore only days into government was initially to maintain the view that “it’s really okay because Dr Mizzi declared his ownership to me four weeks ago”.
That act did not sell well, given that, a few days later, the public found out that his chief of staff too had done the same. So he morphed into “I have asked Dr Mizzi to carry out an audit on his company and my chief of staff is, after all, a businessman”.
Mizzi resigned from his four-day stint as deputy leader of the Labour Party but inexplicably Muscat kept him as his deputy secretly cooking up fraudulent deals that would, in time, send the country’s wealth back by over a billion in lost euros. A job “he did well”, Muscat told the PAC last month.
Then came the Efimova saga. A former employee at Pilatus Bank claimed to have found a document relating to Egrant Inc. that named Muscat’s wife as the beneficial owner of the relative bank account.
Joseph Muscat developed a natural talent for persuading fools into believing what they wanted to hear- Eddie Aquilina
Muscat claimed she was a Russian operative seeking to cause damage to his government and then called up his lawyers to draft a request that the UBO document be examined by a magisterial inquiry.
He called an early election, won comfortably and was “naive” enough to re-appoint for a second time his two Panama mates in their previous respective roles.
A few weeks later, on October 16, 2017, the plan to assassinate Daphne Caruana Galizia was completed.
For the next two years, it was business as usual, until November 2019, when the police arrested a taxi driver on illegal gaming charges. This blew the lid off Castille’s can of worms.
Within days, the Labour Party was in turmoil. Their ‘winning’ team, a triad of sleazebags, was now too toxic for some of the old guard. They did nothing to stop the widespread financial corruption, cronyism and cover-ups. But now they saw their party’s hands were stained with blood.
The act of Schembri allegedly attempting to frame Chris Cardona for the assassination was the last straw.
Muscat “paid the ultimate price” of his studied fake stupidity and, within weeks of stepping down from Castille, was receiving consultancy fees from a Swiss company which, by sheer coincidence, was the one, out of the many thousands in the Swiss Registry, that happened to be named VGH Europe and to have just received millions from Stewards Health Care.
Muscat might be happy declaring for wash and tax purposes nearly half a million euros in his first year as an internationally newly sought-after number one consultant in everything under the sun but he has to face the truth that, in time, people finally judge you by your actions and those of the company you keep and not by your categorical denials of the bleeding obvious truth.