Recent revelations concerning Minister for Justice Edward Zammit Lewis have laid to rest Labour Party president Ramona Attard’s claims that the State of today is different to the State mentioned in the public inquiry into the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, hardly 24 hours after they were made.
That Zammit Lewis is, as of the time of writing, still a Minister in this Government, is enough to expose Attard’s claim for the crude propaganda it is.
Zammit Lewis’s perspective on justice was clear when he, along with then-MP Robert Abela, held a press conference to ridicule attempts to trigger a magisterial inquiry into 17 Black and the Panama Papers.
Ridicule was Abela’s part to play in that little show. Zammit Lewis’s role was even worse. He described Simon Busuttil as a “threat to the rule of law”, when all he was doing was using legal mechanisms to seek the truth on the incestuous marriage between big business and political power.
In other words, attempting to take upon himself the responsibility that the Government washed its hands of.
That alone, if the public inquiry’s findings are indeed to be respected, is enough to make Zammit Lewis hang his head in shame and vacate his seat immediately.
But we are just getting started.
Zammit Lewis followed up that puppet show, in which there is no doubt which side of the strings he was on, with a message to the alleged mastermind of the assassination, Yorgen Fenech. Fenech was by then publicly known to be the owner of 17 Black and therefore deeply entwined in the web of corruption along with Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi.
The message contained a link to a report on the press conference, followed by, “OK friend?” The true meaning of that message may never be known, but even a kindly reading of the intention is enough to make Zammit Lewis’s position untenable.
That his defence for these actions is that he was following the party line makes the implications all the more severe.
Are we to trust a Justice Minister who claims, like it were the most natural thing in the world, that the party line was more important to him than justice?
When asked by reporters in July of last year about his relationship with Fenech, Zammit Lewis said: “There is no relationship, not professional, not even commercial, nothing.”
Fast forward a year, and he now says: “I said that I’ve occasionally communicated with Yorgen Fenech on a purely friendly level.”
This Justice Minster is tasked with the most important set of legal reforms the nation has had to implement since Independence. How can we trust him to do so when he evidently has no respect for truth?
That disrespect extends also to Parliament, as far back as June 2016. At the time, the then-Tourism Minister gave his word that no high-rise applications would be processed before the masterplan for the North Harbour Area was complete.
The masterplan was never completed, yet high-rise developments continue to be built.
Are we to trust a Justice Minister who gives paper assurances in Parliament only to ignore them when it becomes convenient to do so?
The public inquiry concludes that a de facto state of impunity develops when the public administrator fails in their obligation to act correctly.
“These either abuse of their position, or are not suitable for the role they occupy, or succumb to pressure from third parties. For the Board, the roots of a culture of impunity are found in the erosion of values that should guide the public administrator, whoever they are, and the loss of comprehension of what is right and what is wrong.”
Minister Zammit Lewis’s behaviour over the last years, and up until today, shows that he cannot tell right from wrong. It is his basic values that are in question, and why, as long as he occupies his position, the state of impunity continues to reign supreme.
Zammit Lewis’s occupancy of the office of Justice Minister is antithetical to the real acceptance of the board of inquiry’s conclusion. As long as he remains in power, there is no legitimacy whatsoever to claims that the State of today is different to the State described in the inquiry.
This is a man who does not respect justice, the truth, Parliament, his voters, and least of all himself. If the office of the Minister for Justice is to be respected, Zammit Lewis must go.
Only then can the hard work of investigating every rotten deal that Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi were involved in begin.
The inquiry mentions the deals with DB for the sale of the ITS site and the development of San Vincenz de Paul, the sale of public land to Sadeen, Electrogas, the Montenegro windfarm, the privatisation of hospitals to Vitals, and more.
Most of these deals are still in place today. Every day, we continue to live under what the inquiry calls “a structured system of abuse […] born of the communion between public administration and big business”.
To the very person who was known to be at the very centre of this “incestuous relationship”, and who is now charged with complicity in murder, our Justice Minister said: “You were in my heart during all of this.”
Did someone mention communion?
A different State indeed.
Robert Louis Fenech is a member of Moviment Graffitti
