Prime Minister Robert Abela and his Labour government have added another dark mark to their legacy: their total and willing failure to fight organised crime. The inevitable result of this failure is that so far, the vast majority of criminal conspirators in Joseph Muscat’s criminal network have got away with it and are now rehabilitating their businesses and their lives.
Yorgen Fenech, who was freed on bail last week, and that means that all of those involved in the corruption scandal behind the Electrogas project, including Joseph Muscat, Yorgen Fenech, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri are all free. Their associates are also free. The Maksar brothers who are awaiting trail on accusations of having produced the bomb that killed Daphne Caruana Galizia. Only the hitmen who executed the hit are in jail and they serving life sentences.
Not only are these criminal suspects free, but they are also rehabilitating themselves. The State and the Attorney-General completely failed to clamp down on Yorgen Fenech’s assets, and Yorgen Fenech even remained a shareholder of the Electrogas project. It’s as if Yorgen Fenech has been completely unscathed by the authorities except for the time he spent in prison awaiting in trial. Even Keith Schembri is still in business with his paper-import company and catering establishments. On the other hand Joseph Muscat is travelling around the world collecting his bribes with a diplomatic passport.
Joseph Muscat’s criminal network and business associates looted and pillaged the country only to get away with it, and this is all the Prime Minister’s fault who took power on the condition of this same and exact result. The infamous Devil’s Pact that he himself had described first, while attributing to his rivals. This arrangement is not as innocent and irrelevant as Robert Abela would like us to believe. It’s not just about forgiving a couple of corrupt politicians who stole and looted the country. The dysfunction in the justice system and the authorities has now extended to effecting multiple murder cases where the suspects are free on bail and can even travel abroad with their case having no end in sight. We have living among us various suspected murderers including the two ex-army soldiers who shot at Black immigrants at random in Birżebbuġġa during the middle of the night. Others include the murder suspect of Chantelle Chetcuti.
Organised crime is winning big in Malta, but this is just the top of the criminal landscape. As a result of the dysfunction in the authorities many criminals are benefitting. Going further in the bottom of the criminal depths you can find characters like Lilu l-King and Christian Borg who also have successfully got away with it and are even protected by the authorities. This seems how Premiers Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela turned the Labour Party into a criminal organisation with its members and associates getting a free pass from justice, all the while running roughshod over the justice system and causing harm to many victims, apart from compromising the security of our society.
There is no good way how this ends: either by the Labour government entrenching impunity and the Devil’s Pact with authoritarianism, or the Labour Party takes a heavy beating politically with a legacy that is further smeared once a new government takes a hard position against organised crime. Clearly, the status quo is unacceptable and politically, it will become even more unsustainable.
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Historian and Publisher
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