Today's revelation on our front page that former minister Ninu Zammit held millions of dollars in a secret Swiss bank account, as confirmed by Swiss Leaks data, is deeply concerning on a number of levels.

The Swiss Leaks files have been made available to The Malta Independent on Sunday through an investigative partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and French newspaper Le Monde.

From the files, it transpires that not only did the former minister fail to disclose his considerable portfolio when he was a member of the Cabinet of Ministers, but also that he only moved to repatriate that money, or possibly just some of that money, when the Labour Party in power introduced a tax amnesty.

Not only that, but he also transferred those millions from Switzerland to the even more opaque British Virgin Islands at a time when he was a minister and when Malta joined the European Union, which he and his party in government had fought tooth and nail for, to evade the European Savings Directive.

The directive required all EU member states, a club that Malta had just acceded to, to exchange information on interest payments received on savings and investments so that they could be taxed in their home country, with Switzerland agreeing to implement a similar measure.

Had the minister not transferred his considerable holdings out of Switzerland when he did, the government he formed part of would have quite possibly been made aware of the millions he was hiding by never declaring them in his tax returns as he should have by law, or to Parliament in his declarations of assets, as he had been ethically bound to have done.

The fact that we had a government minister actively evading his own government's taxation when he was involved in passing legislation to tax his fellow countrymen is truly scandalous, almost as scandalous as his having told this newspaper to leave him alone because he is no longer in politics.

The tax amnesty that he had partaken of might have 'regularised' his position on a technical level if he did, in fact, repatriate the whole US$3.2 million that he had stashed away. But that does not by any means exonerate him from his serious dereliction of duty to the people when he was in office.

So, at the end of the day, Mr Zammit insists that his affairs are in order because he claims he repatriated the funds through a legitimate government tax amnesty. That may be true, but at the end of the day the 'fine' to be paid was of 7.5 per cent or of five per cent if those funds were then invested in Malta-listed securities or deposited in Maltese banks.

But according to Mr Zammit, that money had been stashed in foreign accounts for decades, accounts that provided interest payments each and every year - accumulative interest payments that were undoubtedly far greater than the 7.5 or five per cent fine paid on repatriating the funds to Malta by any measure. Even if the interest on that account was a paltry one per cent, the costs would have been covered in five to seven-and-a-half years.

This brings us to another matter: are those amnesties themselves merely a legalised form of money laundering? Is it a question of stashing the funds secretly abroad and waiting patiently until they could be brought back home legally against a comparable pittance of a fine?

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall of the taxman's office on Monday morning as he sets about comparing what Mr Zammit actually repatriated through the 2014 scheme against the US$3.2 million that we have revealed today by way of the Swiss Leaks data. If those amounts do not match, there will be some serious questions to be asked of Mr Zammit.

Not only that, but there should also be some very serious questions asked about how a man on the wage of a parliamentary secretary/minister had amassed such wealth, especially considering his income tax declarations, which do not show any earnings even close to the amount he held in Switzerland. He says that money came from his work in the property sector but the word of someone who has already misled his government, his political party, his colleagues, those who voted for him, in short the entire country, for years upon years is not exactly to be taken at face value.

People who are and were in power need to be held accountable for their actions, especially when they have actively stolen from the state he served through his financial obfuscation. Michael Falzon, who also held an account at the same Swiss bank, has already done the honourable thing and apologised but not so with Mr Zammit, who appears to be completely unrepentant, or whose silence indicates he is just waiting for the storm to blow over. This is, however, not a mere passing storm and he will have to be held accountable at the end of the day.

The Swiss Leaks deal with just one bank in one country and with 71 names on the Maltese portion of that list, there is surely more to come once the Revenue Commissioner or the government gets their hands on that data. And they are seeking to do just that with their requests to the French and Swiss tax authorities. The Prime Minister has said that those with secret accounts anywhere in the world will be given no quarter, and it is high time that this kind of high calibre tax evasion is clamped down on once and for all.

Let's hope that this is indeed the case and that in the hunt for flagrant tax evaders the government will show no fear or favour. Those who have cheated the state, and subsequently their fellow citizens who by and large have no option but to pay their taxes, must face the consequences of their actions.