An independent inquiry has found the Maltese state responsible for the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. As Joe Brincat is fond of reminding us, he too is the Maltese state.
He doesn’t remember killing anybody. So, by his logic, such as it is, the inquiry must be wrong and must be ignored.
Brincat’s reasoning is that of a deranged lunatic but, in spite of some mealy-mouthed lip service – to mix oral metaphors – right after the inquiry report’s publication, the entire government, all the people named and identified by the inquiry, all people whose responsibility is explicit by having been in positions where they failed to do their jobs, allowing as a consequence a journalist to be killed, are behaving like Brincat.
They say they don’t remember killing anyone so they acquit themselves of responsibility and live on as if the inquiry never happened. The Maltese state is graduating from suspected journalist-killer to fugitive felon. It’s still the same impunity except that now it’s certified by three judges.
It is perversely impossible to stop watching them do it. It’s like watching the audacity of daredevils on motorbikes jumping over trucks or a diver jumping from an impossible height into a glass of water.
The Labour Party’s president commented on a letter she got from Repubblika telling her Joseph Muscat should be kicked out of the Labour Party and his ministers, found responsible for the assassination by the inquiry, should be permanently withdrawn from the political scene. Her response was staggering. The Maltese state is different from the state found responsible for the killing of Daphne. So we’re done here.
Yes, your honour, I did indeed kill the victim but that was four years ago. I am a different person now. Look, I even have some white hair.
We live in the same state that killed Daphne. In both versions, Ramona Attard was a senior official. The inquiry specifically blamed Muscat’s communications team for the campaign to isolate Daphne. Attard was part of that. She represented the chief culprit, Muscat, when he testified at the inquiry. She’s on the legal team of the Maksars – the mafiosi charged with killing Daphne.
It’s not a different state while Attard still runs it.
Attard is far from the most prominent. I write about her here because she spoke. Like few others. Glenn Bedingfield spoke too, protesting his innocence even as he continued to defend the Electrogas deal in parliament.
The inquiry board found that, had ministers acted on Electrogas when they learnt about the Panama Papers and 17 Black, Daphne would still be alive. Bedingfield does not merely fail to act. He acts to make sure that efforts to stop corruption fail.
Consider George Vella. As a minister in Muscat’s government, he failed to force Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi out. He could have. The inquiry found that, if he had, Daphne would still be alive. He’s president now.
He assures us he is working hard to implement the inquiry findings but he won’t let anyone ask what he’s doing about it. His conscience is limpid, he says. God knows it.
Rpbert Abela holds on to Edward Zammit Lewis to help him get away with the state’s established responsibility for the assassination of a journalist- Manuel Delia
The inquiry found inappropriate relationships between business and politics that generated the impunity that allowed Daphne’s killers to think they’d be protected.
Details emerged of the intimacy with which Edward Zammit Lewis spoke with Yorgen Fenech, including that one time right after a Labour Party press conference where he pushed back on efforts to have the 17 Black findings investigated; like that police chief caught on radio that, one time, Zammit Lewis told Fenech words to the effect of “OK, sieħbi?”
Zammit Lewis does not contest the facts. He can’t. Too many people have seen his exquisitely tender messages. But defending a person widely suspected to have bribed your colleagues while having a relationship with them behind the public’s back is not, Zammit Lewis insists, a resignation matter; not even if it turns out your friend may have killed a journalist to cover up the corruption you were defending.
Zammit Lewis stays put. Robert Abela, who spoke at the same press conference to discredit the people asking for 17 Black to be investigated, keeps him there. Like Muscat kept Schembri and Mizzi. Exactly like that.
The public inquiry found that Muscat’s decision to keep the two crooks in government was the central cause of the impunity that shielded the murderers. Abela does it again.
But this time it’s worse. Muscat held on to Schembri and Mizzi as they were allegedly getting away with bribery, money laundering, abuse of office and revealing official secrets. Abela holds on to Zammit Lewis to help him get away with the state’s established responsibility for the assassination of a journalist.
Within days of the inquiry report being published, Abela got busy with making changes to the way journalism is regulated in this country. Journalism needs all the help it can get but the inquiry found it was the only institution of the state that actually worked.
So far, the only person to be suffering any form of consequence, albeit temporary, from the inquiry’s damning report, is Ian Abdilla, who has been suspended on half pay pending an internal, four-years-overdue investigation.
The rest of them, from the prime minister down, are holding tight, sticking to their seats until the public, with much better things to do than read a 400-plus page inquiry report, confirm them there and absolve them of their sins.
The Maltese state is getting ready to get away with murder.