Joseph Muscat has described this week’s events as his Calvary. If one were to stick to using biblical metaphors, as suggested by Muscat, it would be more appropriate to describe last Tuesday’s crowd outside the Law Courts as Joseph Muscat’s Barabbas moment. The crowd turned up to support fraud and corruption. They cheered and applauded the winner of the most corrupt person award as he entered the Law Courts to respond to the criminal charges he faces.

This week saw the first arraignments in the Magistrate’s Criminal Court. A number of persons are in Court answering criminal charges of fraud, money laundering, criminal conspiracy, corruption and a multitude of other combination of financial crime charges. At the time of writing the second lot has been arraigned and it seems that the prosecution is messing things up!

Joseph Muscat was given a hero’s welcome as he entered the Law Courts to answer what he describes as trumped-up charges: charges which in his view are not backed by a shred of evidence. It is natural for Muscat to speak in this way. No one expects him to make a statement confirming his guilt in any way or form.

Reading through the magistrate’s inquiry report one would easily form a different opinion from Muscat. The more one reads through the report, the more it seems that this is a Peron moment: one of blind adulation. “Ladrón o no ladrón queremos a Perón”. The crowds in Buenos Aires had chanted that they did not care whether Juan Peron was a thief or not: they still supported him. A blind adulation which was immortalised in the lyrics of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Don’t Cry For Me Argentina in the musical Evita.

As long as they get their cheques, on the eve of elections, some of them do not give a damn. They cheer and applaud Barabbas. The cheques in the post, in the opinion of the crowds, can justify murder, fraud, corruption, money laundering: they are a licence to justify anything. This is the basic political message being transmitted by the Labour Party bigheads who organised last Tuesday’s crowds. To hell with accountability, they are emphasising.

We need to await the proper evaluation of the full documentation collated by Magistrate Gabriella Vella for the Courts to be able to ascertain whether there is sufficient evidence to lock up one or more of those criminally charged. Slowly all the evidence will be scrutinized, possibly more will be unearthed.

Messages on mobile phones are as important as records of bank transfers and emails. That is why mobiles were lost and others remained locked until opened by experts to reveal their secrets. Ordinary straightforward emails are as important as emails sent by the protagonists under assumed names. From what has already been reported it is clear that this strategy to try and disguise the identity of both sender and receiver by assuming different identities has been unearthed by investigators as one of the tools used in the execution of the crimes under investigation.

Whether this is sufficient to nail any one of the accused is too early to state. At this point in time all of them are deemed to be innocent. They are, after all, all honourable men: in fact, all of them are men, as no women have so far been arraigned!

One thing is however certain. On this the Law Courts have already pronounced themselves very clearly. Around seven months ago, the Court of Appeal, presided by Chief Justice Mark Chetcuti, had concluded that the hospitals’ deal appeared fraudulent. While the original court decision had blamed Vitals/Stewards for this fraudulent deal, the Court of Appeal went one step further. Confirming the cancellation of the contracts, the Court of Appeal stated that it believed there was collusion between Vitals/Stewards and senior government officials or its agencies.

While the Court of Appeal had concluded that senior government officials were complicit in the privatisation fraud, the current criminal proceedings are intended to prove who did which part of the dirty job.

The current criminal proceedings are nothing to be happy about. Irrespective of the manner in which they will be concluded they are proof of the complete failure of the basic rules of good governance throughout the machinery of government. It is indeed a sad day when those who robbed the nation are treated as heroes. 

Carmel Cacopardo is a former Chairperson of ADPD-The Green Party