Zugzwang

There's a term in chess (and in life) - "zugzwang". Briefly it means that the player must move, and any move he or she makes is going to put him or her at a disadvantage.

Joseph Muscat has cornered himself into such a position. As the legal proceedings he initiated advanced, it became obvious that he had ended up in a hole, yet he kept on digging.

He's making mistakes, and that shows he's in a state of panic. He is now in a position that anything he does will put him in a worse position than the one he is in currently.

He penned a Facebook tirade for the benefit of his acolytes, assuring them that this was no defeat and that truth will out, as he is an innocent man with nothing to hide.

If he had nothing to hide, he wouldn't have a problem with Magistrate Gabriella Vella's investigating him, irrelevant of what her family's political opinions (which, by the way, have nothing to do with her or her impartiality).

If he had nothing to hide, he really wouldn't care about whether he was being investigated or not.

If he had nothing to hide, he really wouldn't care about whether someone had asked that he be investigated or not.

What is Joseph Muscat worried about if he has nothing to hide?

His Facebook post reveals what he is concerned about.

In his post he makes reference to his "work" for Accutor, for which he received consultancy fees of €15,000 a month. Accutor is a Swiss company that is suspected to have channelled public funds (taxpayers' money) to the investors behind the Vitals Global Health Care Group (VGH). We now know that VGH scammed the Maltese taxpayer out of hundreds of millions of euros (there is a court judgement on this). And that Joseph Muscat was involved in the deal between the government and VGH. He was actually the head of the government that struck the deal with VGH.

Schematic-Times of Malta May 17th 2023

Joseph Muscat ends his Facebook tirade promising all that truth with out - as happened in the Egrant case, he tells us.

Well the truth of the matter is that we don't know anything about Egrant. We don't know whose it was, so we can't conclude whose it wasn't. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. So it's actually not a very good analogy.

Joseph Muscat has been bested, and he knows it. He has already been booted out of Castille. And now he is sensing that he'll soon be booted into the Corradino Correctional Facilities.

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" Napoleon Bonaparte