Rest easy, the police are on the case
We can all rest easy now safe in the knowledge that the police are now on the case, examining all the allegations being made in the media through the Daphne Project.
The police force has told this newspaper that it is examining ‘all the allegations currently being made in the media’ that have emerged vis-à-vis the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and Minister Konrad Mizzi.
Forgive us for having suffered something of a lack of faith in the force over the last couple of years, but it is very difficult to believe that all of a sudden the police force has summoned the gumption to investigate its political masters, or that that the force has been let off the leash to actually do its job without fear or favour.
Neither scenario, quite frankly, is very plausible. It seems that too many people could stand to have too much to lose if either eventuality were to come to pass.
Or is it that these latest allegations are just easier to circumvent, especially now that the chickens will have well and truly flown that coop a long time ago, and their tracks would have been covered by the best forensic accountants in the interim period.
It must be said that the Daphne Project
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is a minimal component of all the reports of graft and sleaze that have emerged. This project, so far, has merely scratched the surface of the ground already so well-tread since the outbreak of the Panama Papers.
As such, it is somewhat strange that the police now say they are examining the information coming out when the force did little else but to sit on scalding hot evidence from the Panama Papers and the subsequent Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit reports implicating those same two individuals in the same schemes they are being implicated in once again this time around. The government may blame the media or the opposition for fomenting allegations against the government based on what it deems as complete lies, but the truth is that it matters not who is to blame, what matters is that the country’s reputation is being slowly torn to shreds. And the fact of the matter is that this has all happened because of an institutional failure to investigate certain people who are deemed to be untouchables.
If such people had been investigated in the first place when they should have been, and if they had, through proper due process, been cleared or otherwise, the problems the country is facing as well as those on the horizon would have been much fewer and much further in between.
Much of the responsibility for such inaction, as has been reported recently, falls in the lap of the police force. If the police had, for example, investigated Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri after the outbreak of the Panama Papers, and as the opposition had repeatedly requested it to do, much of the current turmoil could have been avoided. Instead, the police had insisted ‘there is no reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, which might lead to an investigation’.
Could the police not have investigated and then found no reasonable suspicion, and in the process set at least some of the public’s minds to rest on the issue? Instead, because not a finger was lifted the issue still lingers over the country like a bad smell in a closed space.
The general feeling is that they did not investigate because the pair was deemed to be untouchable and one wonders how either of them could possibly be touched now when they were given absolution by the government and the Prime Ministers after they were exposed on the Panama Papers the first time around.