It is unprecedented shocking, and has to be investigated. But how? By who?

It is completely unprecedented in Scottish legal history that a prosecution would be admitted as malicious. That is not incompetence or oversight, that is someone knowingly engaging in a wrongful prosecution and that is shocking.

I am also shocked at the relative lack of comment on this matter in public life across Scotland. More than £20 million has so far been paid from the public purse in damages. The Crown Office’s entire budget last year was around £120m and there are yet more cases to come.

I would have thought the noise would have been deafening. Instead, there has almost been silence. The Justice Secretary, the Parliament and the Scottish Police Authority have said little or nothing.

In my experience as a police officer you gather evidence and, if you are unsure where it’s taking you, direction is taken from the procurator fiscal (PF). The PF acts as a devil’s advocate, challenging evidence. It helps decide if there is a case to answer.

I would have thought Crown Office would have been right in the middle of this case. Yet we arrive at the point where warrants were issued, offices searched and people were detained before someone said ahead of the trial, “whoops, this prosecution shouldn’t have been mounted” and it’s eventually declared malicious. I can’t understand how we got to that point and the system’s checks and balances didn’t close it down much earlier. It’s a legal scandal in a very real sense.

It used to be said that Scotland was a world leader in the administration of justice and the protection of human rights. It’s all the more reason to question how this situation even occurred with none of the checks and balances operating in either Police Scotland or the Crown Office.

I think the establishment could find it almost impossible to identify an appropriate office to conduct any criminal inquiry into this. The Crown Office have always seen themselves as standing above any other investigative authority in Scotland other than the courts and, more recently, perhaps, the Scottish Parliament. Strictly speaking, it’s the police’s duty to act under direction of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Therefore, if another police force is brought in to investigate, all they could do is check the administrative element of the various stages dealt with by Police Scotland officers.

In the absence of greater clarity in the future I can only imagine a senior judge-led inquiry could hope to get to the bottom of this debacle.

Graeme Pearson is the former head of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and a former MSP