The Deiulemar-Bank of Valletta debacle is a prime case in point as to why the country as a whole, and not just one particular bank or another, needs to clean up its financial services act.

That sordid case saw some €360 million in the bank’s asset frozen after it opened a trust for the owners of a shipping line who were, in actual fact, simply asset-stripping the company and sending the proceeds off to Malta and other secret locations.

And while the bank had accepted the business back in 2009, its top brass said on Friday that today Know Your Client and other obligations have become so much more rigorous and onerous.

This is not necessarily about the 13,000 Italian bondholders who lost their life savings through the scam, although we certainly feel for them, it is more about this being yet another straw on the camel’s back, a back that has been very strong after all that has been piled on top of it, but which is creaking under the pressure.

Some of that pressure may be of our own making, and some of it may have been uncalled for.

The financial services sector, perhaps the world over, is still coming to grips with this whole new reality. It follows on the many scandals that have hit the global and local financial services industries – from the Bernie Madoff scandal much longer ago in the United States to the Swiss Leaks from Geneva and the Panama and Paradise Papers. There are so many other piecemeal scandals of financial misconduct that the head nearly spins.

And Malta, in particular is facing an awful lot of flak. The Prime Minister may put it down to the jealousy of other countries, and the finance minister may say that we are picked on because we are a small country, but the fact of the matter is that Malta is on a hot seat, especially after high-ranking members of government were caught committing flagrant financial errors.

Practically from that moment, Malta was placed in the crosshairs, sometimes justly and at other times unjustly.

Just this week we were given two months to comply with the European Union’s anti-money laundering rules, or risk being hauled before the European Court of Justice over the matter. Now other countries are also in contravention of this particular EU directive but Malta is a particularly sensitive case: with very few natural resources to speak of, what we have is our human capital and our services industry. These need to be protected at all costs.

Then we have the European Banking Authority accusing our own Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit of dereliction of duty when it came to a certain bank.

Before all that, we had SwissLeaks, Panama Papers, the Malta Files, the Paradise Papers... the list goes on. Over the last few years, the world has seen a veritable deluge of financial leaks that have exposed the wheelings and dealings of the tax-dodging elites of this world.

These, right or wrong, have all cast Malta in a dubious light and the reputation we are accruing is one that we cannot afford, and our headlong rush into the crypto-currency.

It is not enough to be simply compliant with EU and other rules, we have to be ahead of the game when it comes to regulation – we need to be ahead of the regulatory game if we are to truly thrive as a legitimate and respected financial services sector.

Following the Italian mafia’s operations in Malta’s i-Gaming sector, the accusations that Azerbaijanis and several others are using Malta to either launder money or as a staging post to launder money, and the revelations emanating from the Panama Papers, the question is: what could be next?

Such a question will easily not only dissuade serious operators from setting up shop in Malta, particularly in the wake of Brexit, but the truth is that with each new revelation Malta’s hard earned reputation as a financial centre of repute is taken down several notches. Something, at least on a regulatory level, must be done to stop the rot.

The finance minister may not necessarily need to resign, but he certainly needs to take the bull by the horns and clean up this regulatory mess before we reach a point of no return.