The government can no longer bury its head in the sand while dispensing platitudes and favours amongst the population and, in the process, completely ignore the multiple accusations and revelations of corruption and the mismanagement of the public coffers that it is facing.

Such an approach may have worked when it came to the Maltese public which, despite all that has come to pass since the outbreak of the Panama Papers, granted the government a second term in office.

But matters have now reached a point of no return.  That point of no return came yesterday evening with the publication of the results of the European Parliament’s PANA and Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committees recent visit to Malta to investigate the state of the country’s rule of law.

Whatever the government apologists and trolls may regurgitate, these people who have come down so forcefully on the government are not controlled by the local media, by one political party or another, nor are they ones to mince their words.

And mince their words they certainly did not.  They have called for exactly the same action that this newspaper and others of a like-minded moral compass have been calling for all along.

The government’s communications people are no doubt busy dreaming up conspiracy theories of the PANA and LIBE committees being in league with those sections of the Maltese media that will not swallow the lies and that will not sit idly by while the government runs rampant over its citizens and as it sells off state assets like so many squares on a Monopoly board in what can generously be described as shady deals.

The committees’ MEPs have now called for the dismissal of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and lead minister and for them to be properly investigated and brought to justice.  They have also sounded the alarm over the government’s coveted Individual Investor (aka cash-for-passports) Programme in that it ‘foments corruption and imports organised crime and money laundering into the Union’.  Also on the committees’ radar are the shady operations of Nexia BT, the Malta Financial Services Authority and Pilatus Bank – all of which were at the centre of those leaked Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit reports this spring.

Push has now clearly come to shove and while the government may continue pulling the wool over its people’s eyes and demonising the dissenting media as floundering rabble-rousers, the EU’s lawmakers will not be as easily fooled or won over with cheap propaganda.

Yes, there is a clear and present problem with the rule of law in this country. After all, if the government was abiding by the rule of law, those who opened companies in Panama right after having been first swept to power would have been given no quarter at Castile.

If the government was abiding by the rule of law, reports by the country’s anti-money laundering watchdog that implicated senior people in the government would not have been put out of sight on a shelf and simply left to gather dust.

If the government was abiding by the rule of law the people at the watchdog who drew up those reports would not have been summarily fired, and the head of the watchdog would not have been replaced by an arguably more malleable individual that suspiciously absolved a notorious bank when his predecessor had refused to do so.

If the government was abiding by the rule of law, successive police commissioners would not have resigned rather than move to prosecute those in power on the strength of those reports.

If the government was abiding by the rule of law, we would not have protest after protest calling for the heads of the Attorney General and Police Commissioner for dereliction of duty.

The EP has now put the ball in the court of the European Commission by requesting it to investigate all these matters.

Things, as they say, have just got real and the government cannot continue to ignore this situation of its own making by burying its head in the sand.