Let’s see if we can get this right.

MaltaToday, a paper that is, let’s say, close in ideology to that of the ruling party, comes out with a story that heavily implies the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in money laundering.

Within a few hours the Prime Minister latches on to the story and orders an inquiry headed by an independent member of the judiciary.

This is taking place in a country where the members of the judiciary are appointed by the head of government who has not hesitated from appointing to the bench members of the party itself.

To a person who has just landed in Malta from Mars, this is nothing less than short-circuit justice not much different from the justice as practiced in Kafka and as exemplified in the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The ruling power, let’s not personify it in the person of the prime minister, can be the source of a story denigrating the Opposition, the power that calls for an investigation and by dint of appointing the members of the judiciary, having enough power to find the person being investigated guilty on all counts.

There are no checks and balances, it’s plain and simple awesome naked power, unchecked and untrammeled. Obviously, since we do not exist in a vacuum, such exercise of power cannot go unchecked and in fact can easily be thrown out by any European Court of Human Rights.

But till then, until this power is checked by a superior and supranational Court, the people of this country have only the local justice to tell them who is right and who is wrong and, the scales of justice being so tilted in the way we have described, Beppe FenechAdami, a gadfly in the side of the government, is as good as guilty.

Obviously too, the fact this flurry of revelations and alacrity on the part of the government to ensure that justice is done (an alacrity that is quite rare as the man who spent 13 months in jail on a charge that was patently wrong can attest) coincided with the entry in Maltese waters of a tanker well gone in years which is to function as a gas tank on sea to provide a power station that is not yet commissioned, is just that, a coincidence.

As too it is a coincidence that just a week before Parliament begins the process of doing away with criminal libel, that the former Commissioner of Police, now a lawyer, sought the power of criminal libel to nobble down the editor of the sister Sunday paper of this paper in defence of a man who was  a school colleague of the head of government.

Kafka could not have got it better.