Magistrate Ian Farrugia has found that there are grounds for a criminal inquiry to be conducted by magistrates into the seven government- and government-linked individuals who were exposed in the Panama Papers, after the Opposition leader made a formal request for this inquiry some days ago.

This magistrate is not to be confused with Magistrate Aaron Bugeja, who is conducting a similar criminal inquiry into the secret offshore companies and bank accounts set up by members of the Labour government and those closest to the Prime Minister, with a focus on the Panama company Egrant Inc.

That particular criminal inquiry is being undertaken at the request of the Prime Minister, who seems to have believed, when he made that hasty decision back in late April, that it would be a criminal investigation into the former Pilatus Bank employee who made the revelations, the journalist who reported them (me) and the Opposition media who picked them up.

The Prime Minister also seems to have believed that the whole thing would be cut and dried in just a couple of weeks, that it would focus on that narrow objective, give him a clean bill of health ("We found nothing, sir.") and that life would go on. He never imagined, I suspect, as he rushed to his snap decision, that the inquiry would take months and that in the course of it the documents and papers of companies that include Nexia BT and Pilatus Bank, and of third-party individuals, would be raked over.

But as I explained it to somebody the other day, in the simplest of terms, to prove that somebody doesn't own something, you have to prove that somebody else does. When it comes to ownership, if there is no formal and accessible register of data, you can't prove a negative without first proving a positive.

In other words, there is only one way the inquiring magistrate can state as fact that the Prime Minister and/or Mrs Muscat do not own all or part of the Panama company Egrant Inc, as they wish him to do, and that is if he discovers hard facts - "proof", in the social-media parlance of the Labour Party's brainwashing machine - that somebody else does. This becomes more difficult when the shares in question are bearer shares and the company is incorporated in one of the world's most secretive jurisdictions (which is why our chaps chose it in the first place).

But back to Magistrate Ian Farrugia's decision yesterday that there should be another criminal inquiry, this time into the Panama Papers Malta chapter as a whole, covering all the Maltese politically exposed persons involved.

The Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi gave their number as seven - Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Brian Tonna, Karl Cini, Malcolm Scerri (business partner of the Prime Minister's chief of staff) and Adrian Hillman (does unofficial business with the Prime Minister's chief of staff; former managing director of Allied Newspapers and Progress Press) - but there are actually eight.

 I can't understand why Opposition politicians and journalists, when they speak and write about PEPs involved in the Panama Papers, constantly fail to include Sai Mizzi. She is a PEP twice over, as the wife of a cabinet minister and in her own capacity as the Malta government's delegate in Shanghai, and she is the beneficiary of that now notorious trust in New Zealand.

I am surprised that some people actually thought Magistrate Ian Farrugia could reach any conclusion other than the one he has done. They seem to have forgotten that the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (when it was led by a serious person) investigated all eight PEPs mentioned in the Panama Papers as soon as the story broke worldwide, and concluded that the matter should be referred to the police for further investigation leading to prosecution. If the FIAU has already concluded that the matter should be taken up by the police, then Magistrate Farrugia, who is obliged to respect the rule of law and therefore the results of investigations carried out by the FIAU, can hardly conclude there are no grounds for a magisterial inquiry.

The irony is that the purpose of a magisterial inquiry in these circumstances is exactly the same as that of the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit: to refer the matter to the police for action (or to conclude that there are no grounds for doing that). So we are going to have a duplication which cannot lead to anything but the same conclusion that the FIAU has reached already: that the police should investigate and prosecute.

So if it is a duplication, why did the Opposition leader file this formal request for a magisterial inquiry? Simple: two Commissioners of Police have failed to act on the FIAU reports.

The first resigned within 24 hours of receiving a request by the FIAU to investigate Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, and his successor, a man chosen for his loyalty to the Labour Party leader, has determinedly ignored the issue. The FIAU is now also controlled by the government, following the resignation or sacking of key individuals.

The government, however, cannot control magisterial inquiries - it can only seek to sabotage them or place spies in the machine - and the Police Commissioner will find it a lot harder to ignore the results of a criminal inquiry carried out by magistrates than to ignore the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit.