Police chief should go if he doesn’t investigate Panama companies – Busuttil

Opposition leader Simon Busuttil has said the Commissioner of Police should resign unless he “has the will” to investigate what he claimed was circumstantial evidence of corruption after minister Konrad Mizzi opened an offshore company in Panama.

Busuttil insisted on TVM’s Dissett that his call to the police to investigate many government decisions and Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s offshore companies, should be taken seriously.

“You hide your money in Panama to cover up your ownership. I expect the Prime Minister to shoulder his responsibility… I would have sacked them straight away,” Busuttil said of Mizzi and Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff.

Busuttil was pressed hard by TVM head of news Reno Bugeja as to whether he could up back claims he made in Parliament of ‘millions’ being stashed in the offshore company Mizzi opened in 2015. The minister claim just over €90 was the value of the company stock, which he is now to close after a tax audit is carried out by the Commissioner for Inland Revenue and an international audit firm.

“By their own admission of having opened a company in Panama they should have resigned by dint of political correctness,” Busuttil said when asked about any evidence of illegality. “We have allegations that Schembri bribed a Times director, who has since resigned,” he said of allegations made by Malta Independent columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia with regards to Adrian Hillman.

But Busuttil refused suggestions that his allegations in the House were libellous.

“If the company in Panama is empty, I am more than suspicious that the company was about to have assets invested in it,” Busuttil said.

“Mizzi’s declaration of assets do not justify opening a company in Panama; if he is not declaring the money that was about to go in Panama, then it is hidden money. And this circumstantial evidence is too big to ignore.”

Busuttil was also forthcoming with an apology in admitting that in his zeal to bring people out to a protest the PN lead against what it claims is institutionalised corruption, “[he] made an error” by saying people who don’t attend tacitly approved of corruption.

Busuttil also revealed that he was preventing his own state-paid driver from assuming his duties until a magisterial inquiry launched after a Speaker’s complaint into fuel consumption, is over.

The police complaint, which followed a parliamentary audit into official vehicles’ fuel consumption patterns, led to a magisterial inquiry and on Busuttil’s insistence, the suspension of his driver. Speaker Anglu Farrugia however told Busuttil to reinstate his driver after admitting that the complaint had been rash.

“My driver is suspended because he is pending a magisterial inquiry. My driver will not drive me until the inquiry is completed. This is a case of the institutions not working as they should. Someone under a magisterial inquiry cannot drive the Opposition leader, and the Prime Minister should also lead by such an example.”

Busuttil also pledged that a PN government would not change laws on civil unions and gay adoptions, which the party had abstained in parliament on apart from having raised reservations on gay adoptions.

“Government’s law on civil unions makes them equivalent to gay marriage. If the prime minister wants to change its name, I have no problem. That law passed and we accepted it,” he said of the prime minister’s recent statement that he was in favour of gay marriage.

In January 2014, Busuttil said he was in favour of a clear distinction between civil unions and marriage, by barring religious celebrations for civil unions and not according full marriage equality to civil unions.

“Now that the law has passed, with civil unions equivalent to gay marriage, that chapter is closed and we want to move on.”