Labour minister Evarist Bartolo: I regret not having taken a stronger stand on Panamagate

Education minister Evarist Bartolo has expressed regret for not having taken a stronger position back in 2016 when Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and then energy minister Konrad Mizzi were revealed to have opened secretive offshore companies in Panama.

Bartolo was then one of the only ministers to have communicated his misgivings internally on the affair as well as having sent out a muted public message that the two men implicated in the offshore scandal should not be retained.

“Today I think this was one of the mistakes of my political life. I should not have believed what they told me then: that we would learn from this experience so as not to have an underhand government, but a stronger government than the one playing out on stage,” he said on Facebook.

Bartolo had warned back in April 2016 in Parliament against “forces in society” whose overweening influence was dangerous to democracy unless properly scrutinised.

“We have networks of people who get cosy with parties to infiltrate them and personally benefit off them. This is something we have to watch out for because oftentimes it is happening back-stage and not on the stage itself, and citizens never know what is happening behind the curtains.

“That is why it is important that we have our institutions keeping watch over the way decisions are being taken, otherwise we end up with parallel governments, with one government out on the stage, and the other behind the curtains.”

Bartolo has previously stated that Malta was living “dangerous times”, as protests in Valletta demand Joseph Muscat’s resignation. “We find ourselves in dangerous times and a delicate period where it should be the common good that prevails: reason instead of passion and hatred, calm instead of violence, patriotism instead of partisanship and egoism. Justice can be done without the people and country getting burnt. Our duty is to do our part so that we do not see this country crumble,” Bartolo wrote, followed by the opening lines of the Maltese national anthem.

Bartolo posted his Facebook status a day after the Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech was charged with being the mastermind behind the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, in a case that is now implicating the prime minister’s former chief of staff Keith Schembri.

Bartolo, one of Labour’s only vocal critics of the way Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi were protected during the Panamagate scandal, has previously said Labour was at a crossroads. “We will be a worse-off country if we protect murderers and money launderers; a better place if justice is carried out with everyone without fear or favour.”