If this week’s European Parliament resolution on Malta was not enough of a slap in the face to snap the government into some kind of proactive action, we simply do not know what will.

Al of this ill will being shown toward our country and the way its name has been dragged through the dirt is simply too much to stomach for the well-meaning citizens out there.

This week we were treated to the latest instalment in what has become a long-winding saga of the European Parliament pitting itself against the Maltese government.

Malta was singled out along with six other EU states (the others being Belgium, Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands) in that it displays traits of tax havens and that facilitate aggressive tax planning through its tax imputation system.

Golden visas and passports, according to the MEPs should be phased out, and those offered by Malta and Cyprus were singled out for their weak due diligence.

The European Parliament’s Resolution has also called for 17 Black’s bank account to remain frozen until thorough investigations have been concluded, and for authorities in the UAE to cooperate effectively with Maltese and international law enforcement agencies, in particular by responding to official requests for information.

But it is not only these annoying MEPs who are coming down on the sate of our rule of law, recent pronouncements from some of the country’s greatest legal minds on the matter have been equally damning.

We have had the European Parliament’s PANA Committee, its TAX3 Committee on financial crimes, the basis of this week’s EP resolution, its Rule of Law Monitoring Group and a raft of individual MEPs continually crying foul over the state of play.

We have had the Panama Papers exposing some of our politicians and the Paradise Papers taking to task Malta legal but questionable tax imputation system that deprives some fellow EU member states of what they claim should be theirs.

This is not just a question of tiny Malta being picked upon. Something, clearly, must be done.

And while it may be easy enough to blame those meddling foreigners and the supposedly treasonous opposition and independent media for fighting for change on so many levels, it is not quite so easy when we have people of the legalistic calibre former European Court of Human Rights Judge Giovanni Bonello and the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Malta Professor Kevin Aquilina saying there is something wrong with the way in which the systems has been leveraged from political exigencies.

The government might just get away with blaming the media, MEPs and the opposition for bringing matters to the pass they have reached, but the situation is only of its own self-serving making.

And while the government may point out that the statute books have remained unchanged for decades, and that this administration merely inherited the mess, it has to be noted that no one has seen such brazen behaviour when it comes to the judiciary as we have seen since 2013.

Of immense concern is the fact, as pointed out by the astute judge, that 90 per cent of Maltese cases that end up before the European Courts Human Rights are upheld – overruling what it considers to have been flawed judgements from the Maltese courts – and that special exceptions have been made in Strasbourg in cases against Malta.  So much so that the ECHR is hearing cases from Malta before all the domestic remedies are exhausted – something the ECHR is usually most adamant upon, because the domestic remedies are, in actual fact, no remedy at all.

Could possibly be true that all these people from across Europe and across Malta’s legal intelligentsia have got it all wrong?  Or could, just possibly, be that there is something wrong with Malta and the way the government applies, or doesn’t apply, the law to everyone with equal measure?

So, after the EP’s ever so damning resolution, what’s next? More excuses and more burying of heads in the sand, we strongly suspect.