Muscat-ElectroGas Grilling: Ex-PM Says He Assumed Mizzi And Schembri Wouldn’t Be Getting Paybacks Because He Wasn’t
Former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat revealed he assumed the allegations that Mizzi and Schembri set up off-shore structures to take money from the Electrogas project were false – because he wasn’t getting paybacks himself.
This was said during another very heated Public Accounts Committee grilling of Muscat on the damned ElectroGas project.
Asked by PAC chairman Darren Carabott, Muscat said both ex-Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi and ex-OPM Keith Schembri assured him that they would not be taking personal benefits from Labour’s flagship energy project.
“Just as they lied about me, I figured they might be lying about them too,” he said.
Murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia had alleged that an offshore account, Egrant, was owned by Michelle Muscat, the ex-Prime Minister’s wife, a year after Mizzi and Schembri’s offshore companies were exposed in the Panama Papers leak.
During the PAC, Muscat’s social media was updated 18 times – including many jabs at the Opposition.
“Among all the papers that the Opposition is bringing before the Public Account Committee, there is one paper missing. That paper with forged signatures which implied that my wife and I had a company to take the money,” he wrote.
Carabott noted that paperwork affirmed that Mizzi’s offshore company would start operating “immediately” and that Gasol, one of the shareholders in the Electrogas consortium, divested the same day Mizzi transferred his Panama account to his New Zealand trust.
The Prime Minister said that he has already answered all questions about Panama Papers and that it was not in the remit of the PAC to answer these questions.
He added that Mizzi did face consequences after the leak and that he himself paid the biggest political price.
“He lost the Labour deputy leader post and I stripped him of his ministerial portfolio,” he says. “I was politically responsible for his work. It’s not right to say nothing happened.”
Questioned about why Mizzi was still kept on the Electrogas project, he insisted that “he was the best person to lead it”.
Asked about Keith Schembri, he insisted that he was “responsible for him, and I felt I needed to keep him. And I assumed political responsibility for it.”
The case was adjourned to 25th July at 2pm, subject to Muscat’s availability.
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