So the man known as is-Sej has been sent to prison for two years for his involvement in Malta’s most notorious bribery case. The short prison sentence – bribing judges is a very serious matter, and not akin to stealing handbags for a living – is partly due to the fact that he was the only one in the case to cooperate with the police and to admit what he did. Indeed, it is probably going to be on his admission of guilt and his description of events that the others will go down, considering that they are pleading “not guilty”. Something that also appears to have helped him is his very public donation to charity of the fee he was paid, for acting as a go-between between the alleged briber (a drug trafficker) and the allegedly bribed (the then Chief Justice and another judge).

That donation gave me pause, because the motive behind it was so transparent: currying favour with the court rather than helping those in need. That’s why it was so hyped up in the press, which is what happens only when those making a donation want to seek public relations advantage for themselves. Those who want to perform a pure act of charity, on the other hand, observe the biblical dictum that the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing.

What struck me more than the calculating nature of the donation, though, was that the Lm2,500 – which is the fee this man had been paid – had been given up by him as a bail bond. Special permission had to be given by the legal authorities for the retrieval of the money, by is-Sej, so that he could donate it to charity before the conclusion of the court case and the passing of sentence on him. This elicited more than a few sarcastic comments from those who noticed this piece of information buried within the newspaper reports. I received an e-mail message from one of my former university lecturers, who now lives elsewhere but masochistically continues to read the Maltese newspapers on-line, wondering what in heaven’s name was going on, and why the newspapers accepted this circus act without question. More to the point, why did the relevant authorities accept it, particularly since one of the recipients of this questionable donation was the man’s own nephew, who was described as being of “special needs”, a weird term that is now used as a catch-all.

Is-Sej was going to get a reduced sentence in any case, for cooperating with the police. This is accepted practice throughout the civilised world. If his testimony helps in securing the conviction of the others, then he has to be given something in return. That’s the way things work. So was it necessary to also engineer this farcical donation? I don’t think so. It served to make a mockery of the case, and even call into question the ethics of acceptance by charities of donations of cash that has been obtained through illegal means.

The bribe money is dirty money, paid by a drug trafficker’s agent to a go-between, for his services in getting the Chief Justice and another judge to reduce on appeal the prison sentence of the drug trafficker. Apart from that, the strong likelihood is that the money itself came from the profits of selling illegal class A drugs. How can the charities that have been mentioned accept such money? More to the point, were they consulted before their names were bandied about in is-Sej’s communications with the press, or did they wake up one morning to find that they were about to be the lucky recipients of around Lm500 each in dirty money?

An acquaintance has been trying to organise a fashion show with proceeds going in aid of one of the charities mentioned as a recipient of this “drug” money. She has been told by the charity that this is unacceptable to them, and that their name cannot be used in connection with a fashion show, even one in which the models will not be parading around half naked. This is why I find it hard to believe that this particular charity is perfectly happy to accept “bad” money connected to drugs and the bribing of judges. Perhaps the charities in question could have the decency to confirm whether they actually received the donation from is-Sej, and if so, how they justify the ethics of it.

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Talking about ethics, perhaps it’s time to pay greater attention to the role that certain notaries play in enabling their clients to break the law and to deceive others. Strictly speaking, notaries are not even supposed to have clients as such, in the way that a lawyer does, because they are supposed to be completely dispassionate and uninvolved with any of the parties before them, all of who should have their own legal counsel in the shape and form of a lawyer. Yet strictly speaking that is not how reality goes. In reality, notaries do have clients, and people have their “own” preferred notary, whom they use sometimes in substitute of a lawyer. In a situation like this, the notary is bound to be inclined towards the interest of his client, and situations can arise where this position of trust is abused.

The boundary of morality and of basic human decency is crossed, and sometimes even the boundaries of the law. There are notaries who observe their own personal code of ethics, which does not allow them to get involved in contracts where somebody is clearly going to be cheated, or in deathbed wills that may be provoked by the need for revenge or be the result of unclear thinking. Then there are others who don’t care about morality, as long as they get paid and don’t get prosecuted. As long as they keep just on the right side of maintaining their warrant, they are content to operate in that grey area that disgusts and annoys many of us but is acceptable to them because it pays their bills.

Let’s take the problem of usury. Because it is illegal to lend money at extortionate rates, usurers never enter into contracts with their victims stipulating that they are lending them Lm300 at 100 per cent compound interest. A contract like that would not be valid, and its existence would in any case expose the lender to criminal prosecution for usury. Instead, usurers have contracts drawn up before a notary in which they specify that they are lending, for example, Lm5,000 when in reality they have only given their victim Lm500. The victim signs this contract because of desperation or lack of knowledge, or even without knowing what is being signed because of illiteracy. Surely the notaries who draw up these contracts must know what is going on, even if they pretend not to know. One notary I spoke to about this said: “If somebody comes to me to draw up a contract in which he lends Lm3,000 to a woman, and she accepts the facts in the contract and signs it, then the whys and wherefores are not my business, and I am not bound to ascertain that he has really given her Lm3,000 and not just Lm300 at usurer’s rates.” Is he not bound to ascertain this? I’m not quite sure on that one, and have received different responses from everyone I have asked. What I do know is that there is something very repulsive about this hyper-rational response, and something even more repulsive about the lack of controls that allow it to take place. Fighting usury becomes very difficult when the usurer has a notary’s contract that his victim has signed.

This disgusting business was highlighted for me by the pathetic story of a desperate housewife who started borrowing money from a usurer to pay for food and other requirements for her children. Over the years, she ended up owing this criminal so much money that he was snatching her social security cheque as soon as it arrived, and then, of course, with no social security cheque she had to borrow more money from him to buy food. Her children grew up and left home, and she ended up aged 50+, walking the streets of Marsa’s red-light district, having sex with strangers for Lm5 a turn, to pay her debt to the usurer. When this man was arrested and charged in court, it transpired that he had a contract, drawn up and signed before a notary, in which he lent the woman several thousand liri. He hadn’t lent her any such amount, of course. The original amount this tragic woman had been lent was enough to buy her groceries for a few weeks, and within a few years, she “owed” the man thousands. She said in court that she didn’t even know what was in the contract when she signed it, because she is illiterate and innumerate, and didn’t have a legal adviser in attendance. To my mind, in a situation like this the usurer’s notary is as guilty as hell – not before the law, because no such law exists, but certainly before the eyes of God if you believe in him. The notary cannot have been unaware of what was going on, and he must have seen that the woman was unable to read the contract before she signed it. These gaping holes in the law, that leave vulnerable people open to trickery and exploitation, should be closed. Very often, those who are cheated and exploited are by the very nature of their circumstances the ones least able to fight back and defend themselves.

In yesterday’s newspaper, there was another similar case reported. This time, an illiterate woman was tricked into signing a contract in which she sold a field to just two of her several children, for the laughable sum of Lm2000, when she didn’t want to sell the field at all. As she described the events in court, her daughter called her to go over to her home and look at some new furniture she had bought. She turned up to find not just her daughter, but also one of her sons, and a strange man she had never seen before, and whose presence there was not explained (he was a notary). This strange man produced some papers, and her daughter asked her to sign them, giving her an explanation that had nothing to do with the actual content. The woman signed, presumably looked at the new furniture, and went back home. Some days later, she received a claim for income tax based on the sale of a field, and after protesting that she had sold no field, she was informed that the papers she had signed that day at her daughter’s house were for the sale of her property. Her son and daughter have been found guilty of defrauding their own mother, and sentence has been passed on them. The magistrate has found it necessary to remark that the notary must have known what was going on. Yes, so what is being done about him? Will he lose his warrant? Surely, at the very least, notaries should be obliged to ensure that those who sign the contracts they draw up have read them and obtained legal advice on their contents. In an ideal world, they should be obliged to explain dispassionately the implications to all parties involved, but sadly, reality intrudes and too many notaries are inclined towards the clients that in theory they should not have. Whichever way you look at it, no notary should be allowed to get away with obtaining a signature from an illiterate woman who is unable to read the contract and who has no legal adviser with her. It’s shocking and shameful.