Police Commissioner Angelo Gafa has often brought up the excuse for failing to prosecute politicians due to a lack of magisterial inquiries or magisterial inquiries that are still ongoing.
The Financial Crimes Investigations Department (FCID) of the Police has ten inspectors in total who as of now, are all involved in the social-benefits racket investigation. There was no magisterial inquiry that set these investigations going and they were started by the police.
Why does Angelo Gafa need a magisterial inquiry to act on some cases but in some other cases he shows excessive zeal?
Why does Angelo Gafa doesn’t investigate Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, and Konrad Mizzi for the greatest corruption scandals in our history, but is willing to deploy all the FCID resources on a social-benefits racket that mainly involves poor people and a socialist MP dumped by the Prime Minister?
Of course, these questions are just rhetorical although journalists should press Gafa with these questions. The answer to these questions is obvious: Angelo Gafa doesn’t want to investigate politicians unless he has the express permission of Robert Abela. Robert Abela has already put a lot of pressure (privately) on Angelo Gafa not to arrest Joseph Muscat, but Abela was publicly and privately, clearly very comfortable with having Silvio Grixti investigated.
In theory the law should be applied without fear or favour, but there are of course practical and moral realities that influence the execution of this principle in practice, namely, the limitation of resources. Prioritising the most damaging cases and the cases that are materially larger in volume in terms of money involved, would come by logically. In the case of Malta’s police, the prioritisation is given to those cases that are politically acceptable, and easily prosecutable, but here’s the problem. The cases that are easily prosecutable generally the poor and the weak, and making an effort to solve difficult cases that would be easily prosecutable with a good case is a totally alien concept for Angelo Gafa who has, as of now conducted no successfull prosecution under his name of any significant case.
It’s easy to pick on poor people and socialists doctors defrauding the state. Meanwhile, gangsters and cocaine dealers who have a history of shady dealings with the Prime Minister roam the streets free, Malta’s biggest oil-smuggler dines with the magistrate the is supposedly adjudicating him, and Joseph Muscat is pondering a political comeback. I could go on, but you get the idea. Angelo Gafa is a corrupt cop.
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