It is extraordinary how quickly the situation has deteriorated in this country, with institutions that are supposed to safeguard democracy and the rule of law crumbling before organised crime and corruption in power. But then the basis for that was set in March 2013, when the incoming government, which had swept to victory on an electoral majority so large that nobody dared question or challenge anything it did, swept the decks clean and put into key positions people who had been selected for their loyalty to the politicians who appointed them, rather than to the state and the public, or who had been chosen for their malleability in other ways.
The result is what we are seeing now: Chicago, 1930, but without the gunfights in the streets – though we did have a police officer, masquerading as chauffeur to the Minister of the Interior, chasing a private citizen in the Minister’s car, with its GM plates still on, and shooting at him on a public road at night. For the rest, it’s all there. The police force has been reduced to levels of corruption so great that nobody trusts it anymore. The rot in the police is right there at the top, with a series of puppet-appointees from the corrupt to the reluctant to investigate politicians – it is hard to decide which is worse – and culminating now in the appointment of an acting Police Commissioner so weak and inept, who has broadcast his admiration of the Prime Minister on Facebook, that it’s now a dead cert that nobody with information on corruption linked to politicians or institutions is going to report it. The people have been left without protection where it matters most. We are past the thin end of the wedge.
The matter came to the fore glaringly this week with the issue of two bank documents pertaining to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and the man who handles his business. They are both politically exposed persons and subject to higher financial and banking scrutiny under the law. The Prime Minister’s chief of staff went head to head with the press, issuing threats through lawyers and announcing libel suits. But as one recently retired senior banker said to me as writs flew and press statements were issued: if the bank were to have discovered that the documents were forged by third parties or issued fraudulently by a colluding member of staff, then acknowledging this, even internally, would have put the bank under obligation to report the matter to the police and financial authorities. And in the current scenario, he said, how can any business operator, even a large bank, go to the decomposed police force, headed by an inept and loyal government puppet, to report suspicious activity by the Prime Minister’s closest aide, who the Prime Minister himself refuses to sack and who he has defended even in the face of the Panama Papers scandal and the discovery by the public that he set up secret companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands? It’s not going to happen. “Chicago, 1930,” I said. “A corrupt police force, police bosses in league with politicians, politicians in league with business operators, an underworld that’s networked with people in power and which has worked actively to put its agents into power or to buy and corrupt them, and journalists that have either been bought off in one way or another or are intimidated into doing no more than skim the surface. We have the drugs, we have the crime, we have the corruption – the only thing we don’t have is the gunfights. But I’m sure Manuel Mallia will eventually deliver on that.”
In effect, the rule of law has broken down. It has done so by a mixture of slow erosion, institutions that were set up by the previous government but not strengthened sufficiently or shored up and protected with cast-iron safeguards, and over the past three years by a veritable, planned onslaught on their independence and autonomy. This government has deliberately weakened the institutions that are meant to protect the public from the depredations of corruption and abuse of power, and the end result – so far, because it can and will get much worse – is that the people are powerless in the face of brazen abuse and blatant corruption, of the vilest sort of cronyism and the worst kind of splurging of public money on friends and vanity projects.
These are the politicians who cried ‘scandal’ at the money spent on building Malta’s first Parliament House to the designs by one of the most noted architects in world history – a permanent monument constructed for an essential purpose – and now we discover that they blew €19 million on two vanity conferences/international meetings over a few days. Words should fail us, but now that people have begun to talk, they won’t stop.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com