Commissioner Cutajar, now that you know you can investigate…

Both the Chief Justice and the Justice Minister have independently confirmed that the police force does not even need a ‘reasonable suspicion’ to launch an investigation, and that the police can investigate anything based on any piece of information that comes its way.

As such, we now expect Police Commissioner Lawrence Cutajar to dust off those Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit reports, and all the other information that has landed on his and his predecessors’ desk implicating high-ranking government officials in corrupt practices, roll up his sleeves and get down to work.

It was back in June 2016, a couple months into the Panama Papers allegations, that the police informed this newspaper that the dynamic duo exposed in the massive data leak were not being investigated by the police because the ‘required reasonable suspicion’ to launch investigations was lacking.

A little lifelong learning and some continued professional development are marvellous things and now that the police commissioner has been schooled, it would only naturally follow that he implements the lessons learned in practice.

We can now take solace in the fact that the Chief Justice in his clarifications to MEPs

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visiting Malta on that pesky fact-finding mission, and then the Justice Minister, through this newspaper, have given the police commissioner a lesson, for the state of affairs before that was most concerning indeed.

In his interviews with those MEPs – from the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Home Affairs and Justice and PANA Committees – the Commissioner repeatedly said that although FIAU reports concerning Politically Exposed Persons Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi had reached his office individually in April, July and November 2016, those reports had never been formally reported to the force. When the police commissioner was asked why the force had not investigated those and other reports that had later made it to the public domain - either of which scenarios enable the police to begin an investigation and why an investigation had not been started there and then, his replies, according to the MEPs’ report, were ‘not conclusive’. He instead repeatedly argued that the police have ‘limited competence’ to start investigations and that the FIAU reports were not backed up by ‘subsequent reports’.

Such replies from the person who heads the country’s force of law and order are close to a national embarrassment, somewhat akin to a child making excuses for not having done his chores or homework.

There are two possible explanations for such a stance from the Police Commissioner. The first is that he really did not know that he can start an investigation on his own initiative, as the justice minister has pointed out. This suggests pure incompetence, which we find hard to believe given the Commissioner’s long service on the force.

The second is that he was unwilling to investigate a minister within the Office of the Prime Minister or that same Office’s chief of staff, a far more sinister connotation that smacks of complicity and a severe dereliction of duty.

Let’s be generous and assume this has been a case of the former, in which case we expect the police to launch a full investigation into each FIAU report sitting at the HQ, and into each revelation made available by the Panama Papers.

Anything short of that and it will have to be assumed that it is indeed the latter scenario that has led to the Commissioner’s complete inaction against his political masters.

Either which way, the country’s citizens have been let down by this ignorance of, or the ignoring of, the rule of law.