Joseph Muscat stood at a podium and told the country his side of the story. It’s worth asking what that story actually does to the version his own former chief of staff gave, under oath, over three days in a Valletta courtroom.
Keith Schembri spent his testimony painting a picture of a man burdened, cornered, and ultimately let down by Theuma, by Fenech, by circumstance. He described being kept out of the loop on things, being manipulated, being unaware of what was happening around him even as murder investigations unfolded a few doors down from his own office. It was, in its way, a story of a man who knew remarkably little for someone sitting at the centre of Maltese government for six years.
Joseph Muscat
Muscat’s version doesn’t leave much room for that story to survive.
He told journalists plainly that Schembri never requested, nor was asked to attend, the police briefings Muscat received during the murder investigation. He said he was never made aware of any leaks by his own chief of staff not once, not ever. He denied Schembri had any advance knowledge of the December 2019 potato shed raid, despite testimony elsewhere in the trial describing exactly that kind of foreknowledge reaching the men who were arrested there. He denied the widely discussed “naked man” episode reflected anything real about how Castille operated under his premiership.
Here is the problem: these are not vague, ambiguous overlaps that a generous reading could reconcile. They are specific, direct contradictions of testimony given under oath, testimony that a jury sat through for weeks, testimony that shaped how an entire trial was understood by the public. If Muscat is telling the truth now, then significant parts of what emerged in that courtroom under cross-examination, under the weight of a murder trial, were false. And if what emerged in that courtroom was true, then Muscat is not being straight with the public today.
Someone is not telling the truth. That much is unavoidable.
I know which way I lean. Keith Schembri has spent this entire saga offering an account that shifts depending on who’s asking and what’s convenient in the moment, a letter he says he never directed anyone to write, a phone that vanished at precisely the moment it mattered, a story about “taking whatever he wanted” that his own doctor directly contradicted under oath. A man with that track record doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt just because his old boss is now, conveniently, backing a version of events that keeps them both looking better.
Malta deserves better than competing press conferences standing in for the truth. But if only one of these two men can be telling it, the pattern of the last several years makes it fairly clear where the smart money should sit.
1 Comment
You leave very little doubt which way you lean.