The cheating mentality is so endemic in Malta that there are many people who actually do not understand that some things are not an "u ejja" matter and there is a stiff price to pay. Take the incident of the last couple of days, in which two men who live in Malta - one of them Maltese, and the other Syrian - were caught smuggling two Syrian men into Malta, in the back of their van, on the catamaran from Sicily. The police said that they could not charge them with human trafficking because there is no evidence that the men with the van had received money for their efforts. This is not to say that they did not receive money, but there is nothing to indicate that they did. They had no reason to hide in the back of the van because they were in the Schengen Area already, they were not travelling by air, and all they had to do was buy a ferry ticket. All involved said that the two Syrians were smuggled because they didn't have the money to buy the ferry tickets.
So instead of giving them the money to buy the tickets, the Syrian who lives in Malta, who is just 22, and his Maltese relation, who is just 21, took that huge risk. Did they fully grasp the enormity of what they were doing, and what they stood to lose, and still go ahead with their decision? Probably not, because they would have to be really stupid if not totally off their rocker to risk losing so much, and also spending time in prison, to save so little money. I think they would have seen it as merely just another little routine act of screwing the system, and screwing the system has been so normal in Malta for generations that they wouldn't even have thought twice about it.
They described how they were asked to take their van over on the catamaran, park it in a certain place and leave the door to the back open "while they enjoyed a break in Pozzallo". The other two men then climbed in and hid themselves behind a small cargo of bottled water. So this time it was a couple of men. But for all they knew, it could have been a stash of cannabis or a bag of cocaine, and then they would have found themselves banged up for rather a long time.
As things turned out, to save the price of a couple of ferry tickets, the Maltese and the Syrian who lives in Malta lost their van - which was confiscated under the law, as a vehicle used for the purposes of smuggling - and were fined €9,000 between them. One of them was sentenced to 18 months in prison and the other to two years, both suspended for four years. The two Syrian men who were smuggled into the country were sentenced to a year in prison, suspended for four years, but that's irrelevant anyway because they will be deported to Italy immediately.
I imagine that the two men with the van (now without the van) are currently in a state of shock at the revelation that their bit of petty cheating - hiding a couple of men in the back to save on the ferry fare - is not so petty after all; that they have had to pay the price not for cheating on the ferry fare, but for smuggling men into the country. This is what the "u ejja mhux xorta" mentality can lead you to do: your sense of the enormity of things, of the implications involved, ends up distorted.
Though no smuggling laws are being broken, and nobody is being prosecuted, we see this now on a daily basis in the running of the country: politicians and their cronies behaving in ways that shock people accustomed to life in more civilised parts of Europe. And it is not just politicians, either - look at the behaviour of former acting Police Commissioner Ray Zammit and his corrupt sons Daniel and Roderick. You just have to ask yourself how in heaven's name they did what they did and hoped to get away with it, for all the world as though that kind of thing is normal. But here's the thing - to them, it is indeed normal. They come from a social culture in which The System is there to be undermined and manipulated to your advantage, and where cheating of the grossest and most shocking (to civilised people) kind is entirely acceptable and even admirable. The Zammits probably don't understand what they've done wrong, and if they do, they don't care. That's Malta for you.
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