Malta yesterday received a double slap in the face courtesy, once again, of the European Parliament’s Financial Crimes Committee.

Not only did the TAX3 Committee yesterday pass a vote calling on the United Arab Emirates to take action on the 17 Black company implicated in bribery allegations related to the commissioning of the Delimara power station’s commissioning.

It also called on all EU member states to outlaw SLAPP lawsuits, something the Maltese government has been most reticent to do despite the fact that Maltese media houses have fallen victim to this most diabolical means of gagging the press.

These are most certainly two subjects the government is most reluctant to touch even with a barge pole.

Starting with 17 Black, it is most humiliating that the European Parliament has had to step in on a purely Maltese issue, and one upon which the Maltese government fears to tread.  That is quite clearly because the government’s primary movers and shakers – Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri, both of Panama Papers fame – are evidently implicated no one, repeat no one, not even successive police commissioners, have been willing to  investigate that can of worms.

In fact, the owner of 17 Black, and erstwhile power station entrepreneur Yorgen Fenech, has insists that the police has not even gotten around to question him over graft allegations. And the police force, in the meantime, is refusing to answer this newspaper’s questions.

But, at least, MEPs are cut from a different cloth and, like a dog with a bone, they are refusing to let it go.

The TAX3 Committee yesterday demanded that the UAE ensures that funds frozen in 17 Black’s bank accounts remain frozen, while highlighting the lack of independence of both the Maltese FIAU and the police, not to mention expressing deep concern over the situation in Malta and the political inaction on cases of high-level corruption and money laundering involving Maltese politicians.

Worse still, a call was also made for the establishment of a Joint Investigation Team to address serious doubts about the independence of any ongoing investigations on 17 Black, with the support of EUROPOL and EUROJUST.

Now if Malta had any notion at all of investigating 17 Black, either to prove a lack of corruption or corruption, it would have taken these steps itself before the Committee had issued such calls.

And the fact that it has not done so implies complicity or cover-up, neither of which befits ant sort of EU member state.

And one wonders what could be next.  The answer could very well lie in the form of yesterday’s EP endorsement for appointment of EU's first chief prosecutor.  She is Laura Kovesi, formerly the chief prosecutor of Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate.  The 40-year-old has prosecuted dozens of mayors, five MPs, two ministers and a prime minister in a single year, plus hundreds of judges and former prosecutors.  Her conviction rate is reportedly at 90%

Does anyone see where we are going with this, and perhaps why Malta had held out so long against the institution of such a pan-European role?  If not, read the writing on the wall again, and it’s pretty clear that the fear is that Maltese shenanigans could very well be the first in her cross hairs.

And as for the SLAPPs - Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) – the same Committee yesterday stepped in to demand that member states outlaw them completely, something the Maltese government has claimed to not be possible.

Such lawsuits are intended solely to censor, intimidate, and silence critics such as the media by burdening them with an excessively costly legal defence until they abandon their criticism. The aim of such lawsuits is not necessarily to secure a legal victory, but, rather, to prevent the media from exercising its right and sacrosanct duty to inform the public about matters of public interest.

They have been employed time and time again by some of the nastier foreign elements doing business in Malta, and with the government.

It is high time this media gagging tool was eliminated once and for all on, if not on other grounds, on the grounds of sane public policy.

If member states do not of their own accord the thinking is that concrete action will be taken on an EU level.

Sooner or later justice will prevail on 17 Black, perhaps thanks to the EP and the investigative journalists who have done so much, and, in the meantime the elimination of SLAPP lawsuits will allow those journalists to continue with their work safe in the knowledge that they can only be sued for their stories under the laws of their own country and without the prospect of libel tourism.