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18 maltatoday EXECUTIVE EDITOR Matthew Vella MANAGING EDITOR Saviour Balzan Letters to the Editor, MaltaToday, Vjal ir-Rihan, San Gwann SGN 9016 E-mail: dailynews@mediatoday.com.mt Letters must be concise, no pen names accepted, include full name and address maltatoday | SUNDAY • 1 DECEMBER 2019 2 December, 2009 Central Bank employee cleared of Austin Gatt's accusations CENTRAL Bank employee Sandro Demarco, whom Investments Minsiter Austin Gatt last year accused of passing confidential informa- tion to Labour leader Joseph Muscat, claims that a report clearing his name of accusations was kept under wraps for a whole year by the Central Bank governor Michael Bonello. Demarco made this claim in a judicial protest presented this week against the Central Bank governor by lawyer Paul Lia. Last November, Gatt had accused Demarco in Parliament of breaching the bank's ethics in passing on sensi - tive information to the PL leader. He said De- marco had access to the latest Harmonised Con- sumer Price Index figures that were at the time still unreleased, and which he allegedly "leaked" to Muscat in a report that he wrote for him. "I found that the author of the document is Sandro Demarco, a manager at the Central Bank of Malta, who works with confidential informa - tion related to the Harmonised Index of Con- sumer Prices," Gatt had said in Parliament. "He provided this confidential information to the MLP before it was published." But in his judicial protest against the Central Bank Governor, Demarco claims that a report by an Audit Committee, which had cleared his name of any wrongdoing has been kept secret since 15 December 2008. Instead of protecting Demarco's "integrity and loyalty in carrying out his duties, the governor of the central bank chose to keep the report secret and persist in taking disciplinary procedures against him with the excuse that he had embar - rassed the bank," Demarco claims in the judicial protest. It was at this stage that the Disciplinary Board revealed that the allegations against Demarco had already been "declared to be con- clusively unfounded by an Investigation Team appositely set up by the Bank." The Disciplinary Board concluded that "a calm objective assessment of the relevant facts and the sequence of events would not indicate that there has been a conflict of interest, let alone any dishonesty or lack of professional integrity by Mr. Demarco." Demarco claims that the infor - mation he was accused of leaking did not even exist in the central bank, and that the Labour Party's documents were based on information which was already made available to the public in presentations by KPMG and Minister Gatt to the MCESD. Demarco is now calling on the governor to publish the report of the Audit committee and held the governor responsible for the damages he sustained as a result of the fact that the report was kept secret for a year while he still he had to confront disciplinary procedures. MaltaToday 10 years ago Quote of the Week The Faustian Pact that brought down the edifice Editorial JOSEPH Muscat's era has ended. He campaigned in poetry in 2013 and governed in prose all throughout his redoubtable career, but his exit has been the hardest fall from grace ever in politi- cal history. The air is heavy with betrayal, incre- dulity, the stench of a corrupt cabal that held the Office of the Prime Minister in a stranglehold borne out of a convenient marriage of business and politics. That pact has been etched in blood, the murder of a human being. The ruthless Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech, now suspected to have been the, or one of the masterminds in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, has brought down the Muscat edifice. Nothing could be more emblematic of La- bour's Faustian pact than the nefarious intimacy of Muscat's chief ally Keith Schembri, and his 'business partner' Yorgen Fenech – a shareholder in the Electrogas consortium that finally delivered Labour's promise on energy rates. Therein lay the 17 Black mystery. Now Muscat must step down, resign his par- liamentary seat, and leave Labour – it is the one thing he must do to allow his successor the liberty to clean the Augean stables. Muscat's position was made untenable the second his ally's friend was implicated in the Caruana Galizia investigation. But there is more: Schembri had been present at the Malta Security Service meetings with Muscat in which Yorgen Fenech was discussed as a main suspect, at least since 2018. This serious revelation now demands to be fully investigated: Schembri must be probed for obstruction of justice and breach of national se- curity. Investigate Schembri now, and make him face justice. Perhaps the instruction from the MSS was to keep matters as normal as possible. But Muscat and Schembri were not victims of this circum- stance. At that point it rendered Keith Schembri's position untenable upon learning that his own business partner was a suspect in the murder of his boss's main critic. For by then it was the culmination of Muscat's biggest ever misjudgement – retaining Schembri when he was revealed to have opened offshore companies in Panama in 2016. Within a year, with the snap election that was announced in 2017, it was further revealed that a connection existed between the Dubai company 17 Black and the Panama companies – a mys- tery only finally confirmed in 2018, a year after Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination, linking the Panama companies to Yorgen Fenech, the Electrogas shareholder. But in these three years, the Labour govern- ment held out in defence of its minister and the chief-of-staff, with formal investigations into the Panama Papers never initiated. Muscat preferred to ride the wave of his popu- lar support instead of facing the moral question staring at his administration: the use of offshore companies opened by his closest allies, an action that had a strong whiff of corruption and bribery. Instead of probing his two men, Muscat defend- ed them with legalistic ripostes, breeding – at the very least – a sense of unfairness and indecency that is felt by the common man in the street. Labour may have an electoral mandate to govern till 2022. But the point of no return was crossed once Joseph Muscat's moral authority was compromised by Schembri's bedfellow. Whatever trail of blood exists, it is only inches away from Castille. Now Malta finds itself facing its greatest political earthquake because Muscat refused to sack the men whose treacherous offshore ruse has come to this extremity. Murder – political murder – could be hanging on the Muscat administration. Muscat's administration has been shorn of the moral force that a prime minister needs to keep on governing. Even Cabinet ministers and Labour Party top brass and other former loyalists know this. Ministers who spoke to MaltaToday say they were shocked at the extent of information given to them by the Attorney General and the Com- missioner of Police on Yorgen Fenech, and some even started to question the Prime Minister him- self in the course of reaching the decision not to give Fenech a pardon. With Muscat's edifice, even Malta's consensual two-party system faces its 'Tangentopoli' mo- ment. For long it has been a system whose checks and balances have been smoothed out for the benefit of the big parties which control so many aspects of public life in Malta: the regulators with political appointees guiding policy; the ineffective party financing laws; the control of the media by political parties; and a host of practices in govern- ment that do not check the overweening power of the state or restrict the influence of business on MPs and parties. Will the national protest movement emerging from the wound of the investigation's break- through provoke the challenge and change we need for Maltese politics? One hopes so, and this newspaper pays tribute to this budding movement of justified anger and the non-partisan citizens who are making their voice heard, loud and clear. Perhaps more unfortunately, it is the gaping wound that has been opened that should now concern us, and which future prime minister will take the poisoned chalice to restore national trust, to clean the swamp, and to save the vestiges of Labour's social-democratic roots. "There are serious consequences being felt right now.If we are not going to act and if the Prime Minister refuses to resign, it will be far too late." PN leader Adrian Delia on Joseph Muscat