My laptop has been flashing the low-battery warning every other minute. I’m typing like mad before it goes completely flat. I cannot charge it because it’s been a morning of intermittent power cuts.

Today’s soundtrack has been the bleepy chirp of the fridge, followed by the curt peep-peep of the washing machine, followed by groans of “Again!” coming from all rooms in the house. And then, after an hour-long lull, with that kind of silence that makes you realise how noisy appliances are, the fridge and co. sing again: power is on, until it goes off again 10  minutes later.

I’m decidedly not in the best of moods, especially and as this is happening after a sweltering heatwave night when all fans fell silent and the AC flaps paused gaping mid-air blow. We could just as well have been camping in the Sahara desert, sans the view of the sand dunes.

What was the reason of these lengthy regional power cuts? Obviously, with temperatures close to 40°C, everyone is using electricity to try to cool themselves down, so one would guess that it’s because the demand is bigger than the supply.

No, no, Enemalta said, it’s just that a cable got damaged because of “the temperature fluctuations”. “Fluctuations”? To my knowledge, it has not been 38°C one minute and 18ºC the next: the temperature has been steadily rising.

Clearly, the cable malfunctioned because it could not keep up with the demand of a heatwave. Enemalta was quick to assure that there is “enough supply capacity”.

A line clearly inserted so that no one points at that berthed ship of corruption in Marsaxlokk – which was meant to make our electricity bills cheaper but didn’t – and says imbasta! No one, at this juncture, wants to mention the elephant in the room: the Electrogas power station.

Why? Because it’s one of the main reasons why Malta has been put on the grey list of the international global money-laundering financing watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force.

The Electrogas power station is nothing but a money-laundering washing machine for top people in Joseph Muscat’s government, with strong alleged links to the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was unearthing the rot.

Our Foreign Minister, Evarist Bartolo, was at his most ludicrous earlier in the week when he gave us his usual pathetic cryptic two pence and accused “big countries of getting away with murder”. What is his own government in his own country doing then?

This greylisting did not come out of nowhere. It is the fruit of years of compulsive lying and crookedness by Muscat when he was prime minister who thought nothing of hijacking and betraying the nation to line up his friends’ pockets.

Time and time again, he had the opportunity to save Malta from this mess. But he couldn’t, could he, if he were part of it?

Law enforcement is mostly focused on the average man in the street and not on the top high-ranking people- Kristina Chetcuti

When, in 2016, the ICIJ’s Panama Papers revealed that his right-hand men – his chief of staff, Keith Schembri and top minister Konrad Mizzi – were involved in corrupt dealings, all Muscat had to do was to fire them on the spot. Instead, he called an early election and knowingly protected the corrupt from prosecution.

All he had to do was let the police and all the other institutions do their job, instead he bought and muzzled everyone. All he had to do was resign on the spot and carry political responsibility, instead he waited three years to do that and, by then, the reputation of the country was down to its knees. 

What does this greylist mean to us? Robert Abela, poo-pooed it. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Donworry about it.” Actually, it is a death knell for Malta’s financial services. Malta has now been formally labelled as a country not to be trusted with money, along with the likes of Panama, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

Ah, you might say to yourself, I don’t work in the financial services, so it won’t affect me. Wrong. The consequences are far and wide.

Malta will now struggle even more to have foreign banking partners and it won’t be attractive to foreign investors as they’d rather go to a country which does not have the money-laundering label. Foreign investors already based here will start thinking about packing up and moving to other ungreylisted countries.

This means that slowly, slowly, people will start losing jobs, not only those who work in the financial services but even those who work in gaming, in real estate and in manufacturing and so on.

Abela cried “Mhux fer ħej”. “We spent the last two years doubling the efforts to clamp down on questionable financial activity,” he said.

We, the Maltese people do not deserve this. Apart from the fact that law enforcement is mostly focused on the average man in the street and not on the top high-ranking people who matter.

Unless we show that we are serious in prosecuting people who are or were in high positions of power, the FAFT won’t believe our pleas that we’re reforming.

Getting off this grey list is doable. Iceland was greylisted and reformed faster than you could blink your eyelids. We are roughly the same size as Iceland. If they can step up the fight and clean their act, so can we.

There are two things which primarily need to be done. Firstly, the police have to do their job and investigate all the crooked roads leading to Muscat.

Secondly, Electrogas has to be shut down once and for all and all its investors and directors must pay their dues to the nation.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
twitter: @krischetcuti