Updated | Muscat on Panamagate: ‘It wasn’t nice, there was a national uproar, I had to take a tough decision’

Leading British newspaper The Guardian has pointed out the irony in Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s upcoming speech to an anti-corruption forum.

The Guardian article – penned by diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour and journalist Luke Harding – noted that Muscat will give a keynote address to the Commonwealth forum although minister Konrad Mizzi featured in the Panama Papers.

“Mizzi set up a secret offshore trust in New Zealand, receiving help from Keith Schembri, Muscat’s chief of staff,” the article reads. “Schembri, a former bank clerk, helped set up the trust and filled in much of the paperwork. His Maltese diplomatic passport appears in the Panama Papers. Mossack Fonseca identified him as a Pep, a politically exposed person.

“The revelations have caused a major political row in Malta. Last week, Mizzi narrowly survived a motion of no confidence in the country’s parliament. He was the only serving EU minister to be found owning an opaque offshore trust.”

It was a brief discussion at the Tackling Corruption Together conference hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat, in which Muscat paid tribute to his government’s legislative action on corruption, and then – towards the end of the debate – managed to fit in a few words on the Panama Papers repurcussions back home.

Prime Minister @JosephMuscat_JM is addressing a Commonwealth meeting on tackling corruption. Surreal. https://t.co/MjDeBEclcm

— Simon Busuttil (@SimonBusuttil) May 11, 2016

“It wasn’t nice. It led to an uproar back home, and I had to take tough political decisions that the Opposition criticises for not being tough enough. I think they were. Malta is a European financial services centre and I am here to face the music, understand how the situation is changing in Europe and the world,” Muscat said, before pointing out that he had expected more countries to attend.

Earlier, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil tweeted that Muscat’s participation at the London forum as “surreal”.

"This is how others see us from outside, from the real world, where news is not censored by Labour," he said. 

Muscat is currently chair-in-office of the Commonwealth, following Malta’s hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting last November.

The Commonwealth has been marred by accusations of corruption against several of its member countries. During today’s conference, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari agreed with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that his country was “fantastically corrupt”.

“For too long there has been a taboo about tackling corruption head-on,” Cameron told the summit. “The summit will change that. Together we will push the fight against corruption to the top of the international agenda where it belongs.”

Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International has criticised Cameron’s comments, accusing the UK of being part of the problem by “providing a safe haven for corrupt assets” at home and in its overseas territories.