If you run a small family business and are going through hell to open a bank account, it’s because of Konrad Mizzi and his accomplices. The added bureaucracy is because Malta is now seen as a generally bad place to do business.
The reason? The evidence so far shows that Mizzi, working in concert with friends in the Labour Party, decided to get rich off the back of each and every one of us.
Not only were the Maltese robbed blind but they are now more likely to be subjected to an interrogation every time they require the services of a bank. This while Mizzi walks around scot-free.
What is worse is that he still shows the same disdain for parliament as he does to the electorate that trusted him with their vote. Who wants to do business in a place where this is allowed to happen?
Clyde Caruana knows how bad a situation his party has dragged us in. He tried to assure his public that his government is on it. So why hasn’t Mizzi been prosecuted?
It’s been more than five years since the Panama Papers, when Mizzi was caught with his pants down and his hand in the cookie jar. It was embarrassing for him and, thanks to his friends in the Labour Party, they made it embarrassing for us, too.
Then came the incriminating FIAU report in 2018. It turns out, investigators saw right through Mizzi. They didn’t believe his flimsy excuses as to why he was paying expensive lawyers to set up complicated companies very far away in FATF-flagged jurisdictions.
Investigators wanted Mizzi prosecuted for financial crimes. The Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit had concluded that “sufficient information is available to conclude that a reasonable suspicion of money laundering or an attempt to launder proceeds of crime subsists in [Konrad Mizzi’s] case”.
That means they wanted him handcuffed before a judge answering questions about what he was planning to do with bucketloads of cash from the taxpayer.
While ordinary Maltese workers and business owners have become entangled in a jungle of red tape, having to go out of their way to deal with increased due diligence, Mizzi is able to survive financial investigations that concluded he should be prosecuted.
The buck stops with you, Konrad Mizzi- David Casa
Mizzi got elected to put into effect a road map to enrich himself. This is the long and short of it. And, in order to do that, he dragged the Maltese taxpayer into corrupt deals with countries outside the EU.
We believe they were corrupt because one investigation after the other kept proving them to be. Eventually, we know the money-grabbing plot in excruciating detail: dates, times, e-mails, documents, meetings. Mizzi was pushing for every single agreement, bulldozing over advice from the civil service.
At the same time that he was signing off agreements on behalf of the government, he was instructing Nexia BT to figure out where in the world it was best to stockpile our money, while asking Mossack Fonseca not to tell Maltese banks what he was doing.
Not that Mizzi didn’t intend on having access to his funds. We know he did because he over-declared his assets.
Mizzi said he had more money than he actually did. Was it a mistake? The FIAU didn’t think so. They found so many irregularities in the deals he made, including agreements that were never published or which were tampered with, and incomplete information from Mizzi’s accountant, they believed he was trying to commit a crime while he was a government minister.
Which begs the question: what’s so special about Mizzi that he hasn’t been made to answer for this betrayal? Unlike Mizzi, ordinary Maltese people do not have the Labour Party on their side, ready to ruin a country to save their skin.
The FIAU report catches Mizzi directly contradicting what he instructed Karl Cini to say to Mossack Fonseca in Panama.
This wasn’t Mizzi lying about his height on a dating app. This was an elected official not telling the truth about evidence of money laundering to the detriment of the Maltese taxpayer.
All of this became public knowledge when I published the FIAU report. When the police said they needed the UAE to cooperate, I intervened to ensure that information was delivered.
Yet, Mizzi has the gall to disrespect parliament, even when he knows he’s living on borrowed time, when he knows he has manhandled Malta’s reputation.
It’s a decidedly Labour achievement to have secured impunity for Mizzi for so long. They did so by subverting Maltese institutions in a way history tells us is typical of them. You can place your cronies in TVM and try to cover your tracks. But the buck stops with you, Konrad Mizzi, and your friends in the Labour Party who defend you at our nation’s expense.