The labour of forgetting

At a restaurant in Malta, two familiar faces—Brian Tonna, founder of the now-defunct Nexia BT, and Marvin Gaerty, former tax commissioner—were overheard disowning their old political patron, disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat.

Not long ago, they were the stewards of his shadow economy. Now, they’re scrambling to scrub the Muscat stench off their CVs, despite discussing how ‘Joe l-Għawdxi‘, who they later referred to as developer Joseph Portelli, did his best to mediate.

Tonna, of course, was the government’s go-to guy for discreet offshore architecture. Nexia BT didn’t just handle accounts—it manufactured entire financial ecosystems. It was his firm that set up Hearnville, Tillgate and Egrant, the secretive Panama companies linked to Muscat’s closest men, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi.

Gaerty, meanwhile, was the man with the torch—Malta’s top tax enforcer—who somehow failed to illuminate any of the stashes piling up in Panama, Dubai or the British Virgin Islands. In fact, internal reports suggest he may have been a little too friendly with those he was meant to investigate.

Both men enjoyed years of comfort under Muscat’s canopy. The institutions charged with oversight—the FIAU, the police, the tax office—were either neutered or willingly blind. Reports were filed, then filed away. Whistleblowers were ignored. Investigative journalists were smeared, or worse.

Then came the collapse.

In late 2019, following the political firestorm over Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination and revelations tying the murder suspects to Muscat’s Cabinet, the whole edifice began to buckle. Muscat resigned in disgrace. His inner circle, once untouchable, became liabilities. Someone had to take the fall.

Enter the bus. And guess who was standing in the road?

In 2021, Tonna was arrested in a money laundering probe. His name—along with his partners at Nexia BT—featured heavily in scandals that no longer had a political firewall to protect them. Gaerty was out too, quietly shown the door, as questions mounted over his ethical conduct and curiously selective enforcement.

Now, far from the corridors of Castille, the two men sip wine and trade war stories, each pretending to have been just a cog in the machine, ‘shocked’ to discover corruption in the very halls they helped gild.

Their break with Muscat wasn’t principled. It was practical. They didn’t leave him—they were left behind. Thrown under the bus by a regime trying to cauterise the bleeding. The same regime they helped enrich, enable, and protect for years.

And the pattern hasn’t changed under Muscat’s successor, Robert Abela. The Labour Party now specialises in the art of soft resets: purging yesterday’s faces while preserving yesterday’s deals.

Investigations are announced with fanfare, then quietly derailed. The names change, the machinery doesn’t.

Abela insists his government is a clean break from the past. But the break appears mostly cosmetic; it’s distancing instead of dismantling. The house might have a fresh coat of paint, but the wiring still sparks.

And so the rats keep scurrying and the ship sails on.