It may be perfectly within the Prime Minister’s legal and constitutional remit to be hearing pleas for and recommending presidential pardons, but in the current maelstrom that threatens to suck down himself and his government, he needs to take several steps back. And he must do so immediately before he inflicts any further damage to the investigation and the nation.

The Prime Minister has already recommended a presidential pardon for one of the middlemen in the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder plot, the breadth of which appears to be growing by the day, and he is now apparently on the verge of recommending another for one of the alleged masterminds, Yorgen Fenech.

Now if the Prime Minister refuses to step down, as he veritably should given all that has transpired since March 2013, and certainly after what has transpires over the course of the last week, he absolutely needs to abdicate his role as far as presidential pardons go.

This may present something of a constitutional conundrum but, truth be told, the Constitution, the drafters of which had perhaps naively believed that all future Prime Ministers would always put the country’s interests – and not their own or those of their colleagues first - had never envisaged such a situation.

No one, in fact, had envisaged that the concentration of power the Constitution provides to the Prime Minister would have been wielded the way that it has since 2013.  That, unfortunately, was rather short-sighted.

And it is within the realms of presidential pardons being contemplated at the moment that the prime minister will leverage that power to its full, when his closest colleagues are facing the prospect of prison and when his own future is very clearly hanging in the balance.

Given his proximity to the people he is recommending pardons for and an even closer proximity to the people they are potentially spilling the beans on, the Prime Minister, if he won’t do the right thing and step down now, needs to take several steps back from any talk of any presidential pardons whatsoever, let alone calling the shots as he is since, lest we forget, the president is but a mere rubber stamp for the prime minister’s wishes.

Anything short of that is a perversion of justice.

The family of Daphne Caruana Galizia is demanding an urgent meeting with the Attorney General over the prospect the Prime Minister recommending such a pardon for Yorgen Fenech and by the time of print, an answer had not yet been received by the family.

They are absolutely correct when they say that the Prime Minister has absolutely no place near an investigation that implicates his own office and his closest officials.

They say they are also prepared to use all legal means at their disposal to ensure that the investigation is independent and impartial, and that it runs its full course.  We back that statement foursquare.

Justice must be done and be seen to have been done, no more and no less.

This is yet another glaring example of the concentration of power in the persona of the Prime Minister at the office, and how it could leveraged for nefarious ends.

The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission had found in its assessment of Malta that the powers invested in the Prime Minister of Malta widely overshadow those of the Judiciary, the Ombudsman, the President, Parliament and just about everyone and everything else in the country, and this presents a serious risk to the rule of law.

According to the Commission, the Prime Minister has both Parliament and the Judiciary virtually hamstrung: Parliament, being part-time and underpaid, is too weak to exercise sufficient control over the executive branch; while crucial checks and balances are missing when it comes to the Prime Minister's powers of appointments, particularly his influence on judicial appointments.

Even if it was simply a question of having inherited a situation, it must be observed that that situation has been exploited to its maximum potential since 2013, as evidenced so many times, for example, by concerted efforts to stifle the results of magisterial inquiries to prevent them from taking place and the legal machinations employed to protect the government, its members and functionaries against prosecution.

This concentration of power needs to be kept in check, and especially at this crucial juncture where so much hangs in the balance for so many people and when the nation needs to see real cold, hard justice served up without fear or favour.

With the prime minister effectively deciding on and dishing out presidential pardons in cases in which his friends face the figurative guillotine, we fear we do not see this happening.

He is simply too close for our comfort to all of this.