So according to the police force, there is no reasonable suspicion of any crime having been committed in the wake of the Panama Papers information leaks, nor has there been any political pressure to steer clear of launching any sort of investigation into that information.

It took a front page article in our last Sunday edition to elicit a reply from the police force as to whether it was taking any action whatsoever on the Panama Papers.  After six weeks of repeated questioning by this newsroom, the police force was at last constrained to offer its somewhat muted reply to the situation – by saying that it is doing nothing whatsoever.

The thing is that it is not as though the police investigated the leads and reached the educated conclusion that there are no charges to press.  Instead, it has, prima facie, decided that there is no reasonable suspicion of any wrongdoing and that it will, as such, not investigate anything.

The Panama Papers leaks are replete with leads that the police could be looking into – potential leads on anything from embezzlement to money laundering and from tax evasion to the funding of terrorism.  If anyone believed that the Panama Papers was only about Minister Konrad Mizzi and OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri, they are sadly mistaken. The media will, by and large, only report on the politically, or criminally, exposed people, but there are many other everyday citizens and residents of this country whose actions merit further inspection.

There are in fact a lot of Maltese and residents of Malta who found themselves mentioned in the Panama Papers after they made use of Mossack Fonseca’s services and established obfuscated financial set ups not  only in Panama but in  other jurisdictions well known for their financial secrecy such as the British Virgin Islands and the Seychelles.

And this newsroom should know, since The Malta Independent is an official partner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and has gained full access to the entire set of the Panama Papers.

Not all such goings on are illegal per se, but they should certainly raise the eyebrows of investigators at the police’s Economic Crimes Unit.  

But while the offices of Mossack Fonseca, the international law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers leaks, were actually raided in some countries, nothing even remotely resembling any such action was taken in Malta by the police or by any other authority.  In the wake of the scandal, the Maltese branch of Mossack Fonseca, until then owned by the people at Nexia BT – the same people who advised Minister Mizzi and Mr Schembri on their offshore fiscal set ups – was quietly closed down and its entire shareholding was transferred to companies in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands.

In fact, it seems, not even a single individual is to be investigated of the police’s own accord, although this does not mean that if another authority is, indeed, investigating the Panama Papers leaks that a police investigation may eventually be undertaken.

This leaves everyone in a somewhat peculiar position, and by everyone we refer to the general population, the electorate, which has by and large recoiled in disgust at the Panamagate revelations.

But with the police seemingly unwilling to look into the Panama Papers for possible wrongdoing, what else is there to be done?  We should eventually have the results of Minister Konrad Mizzi’s long-awaited audits, which he apparently ordered back in February.  One should not, however, hold their breath for anything salient to emerge from those quarters, for a number of reasons.

And in the meantime, the Maltese authorities, prompted by the government’s and the Prime Minister’s continual burying-their-heads-in-the-sand routine when it comes to anything Panamagate, are being seen as reticent to take any kind of investigation in hand.

In the meantime, the European Parliament yesterday gave itself a mandate and a year for an EP Inquiry Committee to draw up conclusions on the Panama Papers.  That Committee’s task will be to investigate alleged contraventions and maladministration in the application of Union law in relation to money laundering and tax avoidance and tax evasion. It will also look into how the current EU legislative framework is vulnerable to abuse and that persons in positions of power have used loopholes to circumvent the safeguards put in place – particularly those relating to anti-money laundering laws.

The only hope in Malta, with the exception of further media reportage, seems to be the tax commissioner, who could quite possibly be the most interested party to the whole Panama Papers escapade. But no word of any outstanding investigation has, however, been forthcoming from the Inland Revenue Department, in line with the department’s long-held practice of not giving any information whatsoever about what the depart is, or is not, investigating.