The whole world is looking with interest as what has been exposed so far in the Panama Papers – now a global scandal with far-reaching effects – and yet Malta’s police force is paralysed and cannot act.

The Commissioner of Police, a man who for years led the Drug Squad and the Economic Crimes Unit, has chosen to look the other way and go out on long leave, citing health reasons. He probably regards this explosive scandal as a blight unluckily timed to coincide with the chance he finally got to be Malta’s top policeman. A younger, braver, more energetic and committed officer would have regarded it completely differently, as a stroke of luck and his chance to shine, a proper case with international implications and something he can really sink his teeth into instead of dealing with petty thieves and prostitutes.

Malta’s institutions are fundamentally weak. Their weakness has been shown up routinely over the years, but the last three years have truly tested them and found them wanting. Years of Nationalist governments reorganised the institutions that are meant to safeguard democracy and justice, the separation of powers, and turn Malta into a member state of the European Union – but the institutions themselves were left without safeguards against the depredations of unscrupulous and abusive politicians in power, and there is nothing to guarantee the continuity of administration that is so essential to the autonomy of state institutions. It is only judges and magistrates who cannot be removed by the government, but only impeached by a two-thirds vote in Parliament. But even here, you have a major weakness that is wide open to abuse, as recent appointments have shown beyond dispute: judges and magistrates cannot be removed at whim by the government, but that is precisely how they are appointed: at whim, and without scrutiny, by the government. It was one of the first things that successive Nationalist governments should have prioritised. Instead, they left the system ripe for violation by any abusive politicians who came after them, and that is what is happening now.

Those Nationalist governments seemed to have operated on the understanding that the people chosen for crucial state posts would be decent, honourable, honest, competent and fully cognizant of their responsibilities, their accountability and the boundaries – that their loyalty is to the state and the public and not to the government of the day. What a crazy error that was, and such a false premise. Look what has happened now. We have a Police Commissioner too frightened to investigate the mass of evidence coming out of the Panama Papers because John Rizzo’s summary removal back in March 2013 was not done only to save John Dalli from prosecution but also pour encourager les autres. Nor does Malta have a state prosecutor in the real meaning of the words and role. In France, it is the state prosecutor who examines the evidence and acts upon it. But in Malta, the state prosecutor is also legal counsel to the government (the Attorney-General) – which is an immense conflict of interest.

I cannot understand why the Nationalist governments of 1987 to 1996 and 1998 to 2013 failed to consider a scenario of crooked people in power, when the governments of 1971 to 1987 were so corrupt and abusive that everything possible should have been done to safeguard the interests of the public against a return to power of brigands like that. The Nationalists probably relied on the goodwill and intelligence of the public themselves not returning brigands to power, but as we saw in 2013, the public can’t be trusted to safeguard its own interests by keeping what looks to be organised crime out of power and must instead be saved from itself by having institutions so strong that they cannot be violated by the electorate’s ill-advised choices of government.

At the same time, some Nationalist ministers seem to have thought that having so much power vested in them was convenient and didn’t want to give it up even though by doing so they left the situation open to grievous abuse by those who came after them.

Judges and magistrates cannot be removed by the government, but the Police Commissioner who initiates investigations and prosecutions can be. Nowhere was this driven home more starkly than in the case of John Rizzo, removed before he could prosecute the crooked John Dalli, who was then made the Prime Minister’s consultant in another insult to all that is decent. And all of them – judges, magistrates and police commissioner – are appointed by the government with no consultation and no scrutiny. So all the government has to do is appoint puppets, and then it needn’t deal with the problem of removing them.

With the police in general, there is absolutely no legal scrutiny of officers in the decisions they take whether or not to investigate and prosecute. The flipside is that there is no protection for officers who act in good faith, either.

The government’s ability to appoint and remove the Commissioner of Police at will has to go. The different roles of the Attorney-General have to be separated, because the conflict of interest is blatant and serves the public ill. The police should no longer be involved in prosecutions – this is the old UK model that was abandoned years ago in favour of the Crown Prosecution Service led by the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Security Service should be led by somebody who has the trust of both government and Opposition – otherwise, there is a very real risk that the extensive powers vested in this office can and will be abused for politically partisan reasons and vendettas against critics of the government, especially given the anomalous situation in Malta in which warrants for telephone surveillance are signed not by a judge but by the Minister of the Interior (something else that has got to change because it allows for abuse).

Conditions of employment have to be improved in all these institutions. The Attorney-General’s Office lacks quality and experience – new graduates, the only staff it can attract on the conditions given, are having to prosecute in trials by jury where they are up against defence lawyers who are highly experienced and knowledgeable. This is an inequality of arms that favours the defendant. Besides, if state lawyers and police officers are paid peanuts, there is a great risk that they can be corrupted.

This is a full-blown institutional crisis that stems from a blatant disregard for the basic tenets of democracy – democracy being a state of play with which the Maltese are culturally and historically completely unfamiliar.