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Simon Busuttil Tells Prime Minister: ‘You Only Have Yourself To Blame For Fuelling Egrant Suspicions’

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Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and former Opposition leader Simon Busuttil during a Xarabank debate on Egrant last year (Photo: Xarabank)

Former PN leader Simon Busuttil has insisted that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat “only has himself to blame” for feeling suspicions that his wife was the owner of the infamous Panama company Egrant.

“Prime Minister, cut the bluff and publish the full Egrant report,” Busuttil tweeted last night. “You only have yourself to blame for fuelling suspicions with your refusal to take action on the Panama Papers that exposed your sidekicks. And you still defend them.”

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Muscat last night refused a request by Opposition leader Adrian Delia to speak in Parliament about the Attorney General’s recent revelation that he had handed a copy of the inquiry to Justice Minister Owen Bonnici in his capacity as “legal counsel” to the Prime Minister.

“Seeing as you opened a legal case on the matter, the issue will now be resolved there,” Muscat told Delia. “One of your MPs [Simon Busuttil] has repeated these lies countless times and I was expecting him to have the decency to stand up and apologise to me. I was mistaken.”

Although Busuttil didn’t speak in Parliament, he later took to Twitter to address the Prime Minister’s demand for him to apologize.

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Earlier this year, a magisterial inquiry ruled that there existed no evidence to substantiate claims, originally made by late journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, that the Prime Minister’s wife Michelle Muscat owns Egrant – one of three Panama companies set up by financial advisory firm Nexia BT that were exposed in the Panama Papers. The other two Panama companies in question belonged to Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri.

During last year’s election campaign, Busuttil gave a lot of weight to the Egrant allegation, calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation over it.

After the inquiry was concluded, his successor Adrian Delia demanded Busuttil shoulder responsibility for making the allegations his own and resign from the PN parliamentary group. However, Busuttil refused to do so, setting into motion an internal party dispute that ended with Delia retracting his call on his predecessor to step down.

READ NEXT: Was It All Just One Big Lie? Your Egrant Questions Answered

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Tim is interested in the rapid evolution of human society and is passionate about justice, human rights and cutting-edge political debates. You can follow him on Instagram or Twitter/X at @timdiacono or reach out to him at [email protected]

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