In this piece, we go back to the highs and lows of the Central Bank of Malta’s Governor Edward Scicluna, when he was still Minister of Finance. On another note, have you ever wondered why the word ‘GOVERN-or’ is used? Quite interesting, isn’t it?
Here is a short information from various articles which show the highs and lows of Edward Scicluna throughout his tenure as a Finance Minister.
August 14, 2015: Daphne’s Running Commentary: “The government is preparing us for the worst already as its benighted power station plans, which began with corruption and progressed to the bankruptcy of the company’s lead shareholder, are now sinking two years later in a chaotic morass of comings and goings and secretive deals. Two years after the shareholders of Electrogas Malta signed their corrupt, pre-arranged deal with the Malta government, they have only just secured the €450 million loan that will finance only their capital expenditure. And they only got the loan because the Malta government, with its back up against the wall and a gun to its head, agreed to stand as guarantor for €360 million of that loan. This means that if Electrogas Malta fails to pay its dues to the banks, the government will be legally obliged – and forced – to pay the private company’s debts, using public money and public property, up to €360 million. As though this were not sufficiently crazy and irresponsible, we have now been told via a press conference that the government is prepared to pay for the power station itself if Electrogas Malta cannot meet its obligations […] This is where corruption brings you: to these dark, messy and disorganised holes in which plans go to die.” Please continue reading here.
November 2, 2014: Daphne’s Running Commentary about the rooms that Toni Abela and the Labour Delegation had stayed in when in China: “Who paid? The Labour Party, with its donation of ftit minghand il-hafna? What a way to spend it. China? It’s wrong for a political party to accept this kind of hospitality from foreign regimes. The government of Malta? I think a couple of questions in parliament are called for. Apparently, it’s not OK for the then finance minister to take a trip on a businessman’s private plane, but it’s perfectly all right for an entire Labour delegation to take a really big and expensive trip as guests of the Chinese Community Party. Or splash public money around by raiding Edward Scicluna’s box to pay for it.”
October 8, 2015: Daphne’s Running Commentary: “Pierre Cachia, who used to work for the Labour Party’s television station, Super One, as a floor manager, has been given three consultancy contracts over the last year: PR consultancy to Finance Minister Edward Scicluna (what does a television floor manager know about PR?) for €2,167 a month; coordination of an anti-litter campaign for Transport Minister Joe Mizzi at a fee of €18,404; and media-related services for Environment Minister Leo Brincat at €1,180 a month”.
March 1, 2016: Daphne’s Running Commentary: “The Finance Minister, Edward Scicluna, was scheduled to speak to the press yesterday afternoon on routine matters. The press conference, which had been set up before the latest news on the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, was called off shortly before it was due to start. I do not for one moment believe that Scicluna knew about any of this, and from what I know of him – which admittedly does not go beyond a few conversations during work meetings in what now seems to be another lifetime – I would say that he is as shocked as the rest of us and contemplating his next step. Cabinet ministers with a personal and professional reputation to protect cannot afford to be caught up and tainted by association with this corruption. Scicluna will not be the only one. I don’t think there is a journalist right now who wouldn’t give his or her right arm to be an invisible presence at their cabinet meeting in the midst of this crisis. How can the Prime Minister face his ministers? He has lost their respect and his authority”.
March 22, 2016 at 5:09pm: Daphne’s Running Commentary: “The Finance Minister has pronounced himself on his cabinet colleague, Konrad Mizzi, and Panamagate. Read what he had to say here. He talked about how his cabinet colleague is undergoing a tax audit, as though this will somehow clarify matters or change the situation. This is not about tax. This is about crime. This is about money-laundering. It is not a matter for the Commissioner for Revenue but a matter for the Commissioner of Police. Whether there is money or not is, at this stage, irrelevant. There is no money which can possibly be legal because Konrad Mizzi’s only legal source of income is his government salary and rent from his London flat. Or is it a house now? What we are talking about here is intent: what that company was set up for. The Commissioner for Revenue cannot investigate that – it is not within his sphere of authority or competence to do. The Finance Minister knows this. ‘Several European Commissioners set up and declare their own trusts to manage their wealth. The issue is not whether ministers should be allowed to open trusts but whether Mizzi’s motivation in doing so was legitimate,’ he told Malta Today. Exactly so. And this is not about trusts, anyway – this is about companies in Panama. Those European Commissioners will have trusts in their own country and not trusts in New Zealand holding companies in secretive and EU-blacklisted Panama. Oh, and they will also have actual wealth to manage, which Konrad Mizzi does not. He has a government salary and a flat, and premises of no declared address in London. The Finance Minister also dodged questions on whether he will be the Prime Minister’s substitute nominee for the European Court of Auditors, and when asked whether he will resign from the cabinet so as not to be tainted with corruption, he laughed it off and said: ‘Resign? As if.'”
March 22, 2016 at 10:14pm: Daphne’s Running Commentary: “Watch the video in this link. The Finance Minister talks about how trusts are legitimate and how European Commissioners use them to hold their assets. This is completely disingenuous. I chose that word because I don’t particularly wish to accuse the Finance Minister of seeking deliberately to mislead. The trusts used by European commissioners and several cabinet ministers in Europe are called ‘blind trusts’. People with considerable assets and/or businesses, who are in political positions of decision-making power – like the aforementioned European Commissioners and cabinet ministers – place their holdings, particularly business shares, in blind trusts for the duration of their term in office IN THE INTERESTS OF PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY, which is precisely the opposite of what Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri sought to do. They sought total secrecy and concealment. There is another point. Blind trusts – which is what Edward Scicluna was talking about – are not set up to receive money. They are set up to contain already existing cash of a portfolio of investments (shares, bonds, stocks, whatever) and managed by the trustees – with the trust assets sold and replacement stocks bought – in such a way that the politician is supposed to have no idea which shares are owned or not by his trust. This is to make sure that when a politician makes a policy decision, he does not do so in ways that benefit his own holdings. As I said – completely the opposite of what Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi (and quite frankly, probably also Joseph Muscat given the way he is defending them) planned to do. The Finance Minister is completely wrong in seeking to give the impression that Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s New Zealand trusts are in any way comparable to the blind trusts set up by European politicians FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF TRANSPARENCY AND PROTECTING THE PUBLIC INTEREST. It was also disingenuous of the Finance Minister to avoid the subject of companies in Panama and talk only about trusts, when the real issue here is the companies in Panama. The trust is simply a holding (and hiding) vehicle for the Panamanian companies which will be invoicing for commissions.”
April 5, 2016: Daphne’s Running Commentary: “Finance Minister Edward Scicluna spoke clearly in parliament today for the first time since the revelation that his ministerial colleague and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff hold companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand, with Keith Schembri also owning a company in the British Virgin Islands. Using the time-honoured coded language of politics for ‘I think he should bloody well kick them out’, Edward Scicluna said that the Prime Minister ‘has to take strong and tough decisions in the wake of revelations in the Panama Papers’.”
August 12, 2020: The Shift News – “Finance Minister Edward Scicluna on Wednesday spoke of his ministry’s struggle to obtain information from Projects Malta on deals such as the Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) hospital deal, and did not exclude that former government officials could be the beneficial owners of VGH.”
Do you think that Edward Scicluna should resign, as the three stooges Mark Camilleri, Jason Azzopardi and David Casa hammered upon?