The courts have spoken with finality. The VGH and Steward deals stink of collusion. And the stink involved skunks representing the government. By finding Joseph Muscat, as prime minister, responsible for some of the court costs, the court is saying he bears ultimate responsibility.

How should political responsibility be distributed? Beside the skunks, there are the weasels, who say it had nothing to do with them. We need to go back almost 10 years to appreciate the long saga of evasions, obstructions and deliberate silences.

The hospitals deal was a chronicle of a heist foretold. In October 2014, the government signed a secret memorandum of understanding with the businesspersons behind Vitals Global Healthcare. That was a full five months before Projects Malta published a request for proposals from anyone interested in running the three hospitals.

In March 2015, Daphne Caruana Galizia revealed that the government had already reached this agreement. All cabinet ministers took it in their stride. No one asked questions. And, as the saga unfolded, they never did.

The existence of the MoU was then confirmed. The government reacted by doing everything to prevent the public from seeing it. Malta Enterprise rejected a request by Times of Malta and would not let the data commissioner see it. Even the auditor general obtained very limited information.

Although the then economy minister, Chris Cardona, had signed the MoU, he said he was not otherwise involved in any way. The auditor general understood the MoU was signed at Castille.

Neither the ministry nor Malta Enterprise were involved in assessments of the project’s viability or feasibility studies – a crucial detail given that the project failed.

Due diligence on the investors was carried out. It was negative. But the auditor general was not allowed to see the report. And the government continued with negotiations anyway.

The NAO is clear that the whole process was fraudulent: “The overlap in terms of the nature of the project and the identity of the investors is evident and strongly supports this Office’s understanding of a process that was fraudulently contrived.”

Journalists asked questions. The first strategy was to starve them of information. If claiming ‘commercial sensitivity’ didn’t work with the appropriate authorities, then the documents – invoices, contracts, the MoU itself – were said to be missing.

Also missing was any sense of gravity: losing state documents is, potentially, a crime. Yet, there is no record of ministers asking questions. They now claim they knew nothing but they must have earnestly striven to remain ignorant.

Consider the case of Edward Scicluna, then finance minister. He now claims all critical decisions for dodgy deals were taken by a kitchen cabinet. But that’s not what he told the court when Repubblika requested an investigation into the behaviour of Scicluna, Cardona and Konrad Mizzi.

Repubblika’s request rested on scandalous revelations by The Shift News. If Scicluna knew nothing, did the reports not give him reason to pause?

No, he smeared the journalist, Caroline Muscat. Then he objected that the VGH deal was government policy. Therefore, it was unfair to single out individual ministers when the whole cabinet was responsible.

Which was it – the handiwork of the entire cabinet or just a kitchen cabinet? Both can’t be true. Cardona, who made similar arguments about cabinet responsibility before the court, later said the deal was spearheaded by Keith Schembri, who in this saga has the role of Schroedinger’s Rat, sometimes in, sometimes out. 

I’d like Robert Abela to tell us, with a straight face, that he believes Muscat still deserves his post-premiership perks, despite everything we now know about this rotten deal- Ranier Fsadni

It seems the other ministers weren’t startled to see they were being saddled with responsibility for the details of the VGH deal.

When an inquiry finally got going, Mizzi signed the side deal that promised Steward €100 million, should they ever walk away.

Here’s where it gets curiouser. When former ministers like Evarist Bartolo claimed they knew nothing about that promise, his former boss, Muscat, countered that all the documentation had been presented to cabinet.

But Muscat said something different under oath. The first court sentence reports him saying, in 2021, that he didn’t know about the figure of €100 million. Which is it? He should be asked. Mizzi still holds that the deal was in Malta’s best interests. Does Muscat agree?

Meanwhile, Schembri is trying to put as much distance as he could from the deal. He told Times of Malta that the court sentence didn’t mention him. How could it? He repeatedly avoided helping the auditor general figure out just what took place after 2014.

But if the court found the then prime minister partly responsible, how could his chief of staff not be responsible too? 

So much for the local skunks, they who touched almost nothing without leaving a stink: broken promises, secret agreements, millions skimmed at the taxpayer’s expense and profits pocketed by familiar figures and sinister international shadows.

But what of the weasels who will try to wriggle out of holding them to political account?  They will tell us this case lies in the past. No, its financial burden will be carried by future generations.

They will tell us Muscat has paid a heavy political price already. No, he did not resign over the Vitals deal. He’s still scot-free over that.

I’d like Robert Abela to tell us, with a straight face, that he believes Muscat still deserves his post-premiership perks, despite everything we now know about this rotten deal.

Abela should be asked whether Mizzi is still a Labour member. And he should be asked if Schembri or companies linked to him are still being awarded government contracts.

If all we get are weasel words, we’ll know Abela is afraid of what might happen if he ostracised them.