Clear your mind, presume innocence and begin afresh. Do not consider them scandals, these stories that crowded the news pages this past week alone. 

How the Prime Minister’s chief of staff refused to answer questions under oath lest he incriminate himself in the 17 Black case. 

How three ministers protest so much against a magisterial inquiry that would clear them of what they say are self-evidently baseless, malicious charges in the Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) deal. How certain developers seem to transcend gravity when it comes to planning permissions and enforcement... 

Assume there’s nothing there, only confirmation bias, conspiracy theories, and partisan malice. What else would you need to believe for innocence to shine? When your annoying in-law mocks you for being naive at the next family lunch, what would you need to make him see? 

Let’s take 17 Black. Leaked documents show this company, since revealed to belong to the businessman, Yorgen Fenech, was supposed to pay out €5,000 daily to Keith Schembri, who says these were only draft plans. 

You must believe that having a draft plan to receive €5,000 daily, into a Panama company, is nothing wrong in itself. Would it have been wrong to go through with it? If yes, why is it ok to have considered doing it? If it’s not wrong to go through with it, why insist it’s a draft plan? 

You must also believe that it’s possible to be innocent, say the truth under oath, but still incriminate yourself in another inquiry. 

Then there’s the Prime Minister. He says he doesn’t know who the company MacBride belongs to. But his chief of staff must know, since he had ‘draft business plans’ in connection with it. Joseph Muscat says he hasn’t asked Schembri who it belongs to. 

Muscat says he will await the results of the legal process to decide whether to sack Schembri. 

Here you must believe that Muscat knows nothing more about the case than we do – he’s said so. In principle, Schembri could be guilty and the Prime Minister might have a crook working for him. But you must believe Muscat prefers to wait – without even asking Schembri, in confidence, to whom the crucial companies belong to. 

To be clear, to believe this and not be disturbed, you must also believe that this is a good way to run the most sensitive office in the land. You must believe that if a bank, or major publicly owned company, had its CEO under a cloud of suspicion, it would not even suspend him and let him clear his name first – that this would be good practice and not give rise to a fall in the value of the stock and market jitters. 

Now, let’s take the VGH case. The three ministers resisting a magisterial inquiry state that the reports showing prima facie evidence of secret deals and money-laundering, by the secret buyers of three public hospitals, are fake news. Not simply mistaken. But a ‘crystal-clear’ case of malicious reporting making something out of nothing. 

Does an unexpected estate sprouting out of virgin land amount to a virgin birth? There’s a reason we should keep religion out of politics

Now, journalists aren’t infallible. But that’s not what the ministers are claiming. They’re saying no respectable reporting would conclude anything is wrong from the leaked documents. 

What do top international reporters – leaders in their game – say? They draw the same conclusions arrived at by this newspaper and other journalists (like Daphne Caruana Galizia and Caroline Muscat). 

To believe the ministers, therefore, you need to believe that top global journalism organisations can’t tell what’s legitimate reporting – not half as well as Konrad Mizzi, Chris Cardona and Edward Scicluna. 

Or else you might need to believe in a global journalistic cons-piracy. But that means that you started out by giving up one conspiracy theory – that this government is out to plunder the country – only to give in to another. 

The ministers reply that they can demonstrate that the Maltese journalists are in bad faith. They speak of ‘anti-Labour’ pseudo-reports in the Times of Malta when Caroline Muscat still worked here. That’s a serious smear of this newspaper, not just Muscat. 

But what were these ‘anti-Labour’ articles? The ministers don’t say. But the articles are easy to trace. One notable investigation was the Gaffarena case – a scandal described as such by the Auditor General, and which led to the resignation of one junior minister and a court case against the developer concerned. 

Whichever case the ministers have in mind, you need to believe that an anti-corruption news investigation is ‘anti-Labour’. Strictly speaking, that means that digging into corruption is against Labour’s interests. You need to believe it doesn’t.

And you need to believe that the ministers are thinking of some investigations that no one else can think of. 

As for the developers defying gravity, this one’s tricky. Alfred Sant, the former Labour leader, believes there’s something not quite right about permits and enforcement for certain developers. 

Does an unexpected estate sprouting out of virgin land amount to a virgin birth? There’s a reason we should keep religion out of politics. 

But you don’t need to stray into speculative theology. If it’s a case of levitating above enforcement and changing the water of a single room into the wine of real estate in pristine areas, all you must believe is that the developer has an interceding saint. 

Surely, you must believe this can happen. It must be easier than believing that Sant is right.

ranierfsadni@europe.com