Past the point of questions: Victoria Buttigieg must resign

Last February, this newspaper carried an editorial which said that questions had to be raised on whether Victoria Buttigieg’s position as Attorney General remains tenable or not.

That was in response to a fiasco in court when the prosecution’s star witness in the infamous botched 2010 HSBC heist refused to testify against his accomplices out of fear for the safety of his family.

This came after the same star witness – Darren Debono, known as itTopo – was the beneficiary of a plea deal over his involvement in the heist, a deal which saw him sent to prison for 10 years but have the charge of attempted murder against police officers involved in the resulting shootout on that day dropped.

The events surrounding this plea deal led some to call for Buttigieg’s resignation. This newspaper gave her the benefit of the doubt – but after another two high-profile errors, it is clear that Buttigieg’s position is no longer tenable.

The said errors both came this week.

One was a referral note which listed the wrong charges against two of Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers, and subsequently led to them being cleared of allegedly trying to bribe a journalist.

In this case, Charles Mercieca and Gianluca Caruana Curran were charged with an offence known as active bribery after they attempted to give a journalist a folded roll of notes after a meeting in November 2020. The compilation of evidence was set out in such a manner to reflect these charges, only for the Attorney General to then indicate a different provision of the law, which concerns passive bribery, in its note for referral.

Active corruption can be defined as a person paying or promising to pay a bribe, while passive corruption concerns any person who is soliciting or accepting such a bribe.

In this case, the only person who could have feasibly been charged with passive corruption could have been the journalist Ivan Martin himself, but the judgement acknowledged and specified that Martin had refused any offer of money made to him and that the prosecution from the beginning had no intention to charge him in relation to the case.

The court said that because it was clear that no crime related to passive corruption had occurred, it is inconceivable that the two lawyers could be considered as being complicit in such a crime. They were therefore both cleared.

The second case is another serious one, concerning the extradition of a man linked to one of Italy’s biggest mafia syndicates.

John Spiteri had been investigated as a result of raids carried out last year by the Italian police, after a four-year investigation into a drug trafficking ring. Some 430kg in cannabis, cannabis resin and cocaine were reportedly seized by the Italian Guardia di Finanza during the raids which largely targeted individuals from known mafia families such as the Ndrangheta syndicate.

He was arrested in Malta after Italian police issued a European Arrest Warrant and proceedings for his extradition to Italy began in Malta’s courts.

These proceedings collapsed on Thursday however after the prosecution failed to exhibit complete documentation regarding the European Arrest Warrant itself. As a result, the proceedings collapsed and Spiteri is set to be released.

While any error is definitely something not to be justified, the AG Office’s errors in these two high-profile cases are particularly worrying.

We cannot speak about the proper operation of our justice system when the prosecution itself is making such basic procedural mistakes and allowing people facing serious charges to get off scot-free.

Buttigieg was appointed to the post in September 2020 and there were already some doubts on her capabilities for the position, particularly given that she specialised in civil, administrative and constitutional law rather than criminal law.

In fact, she had never worked in criminal law and had never handled a single criminal case before she was appointed as Attorney General.

It’s clear now that she is out of her depth.

Successive Justice Ministers – first Edward Zammit Lewis when he was faced with the issues concerning it-Topo’s plea deal, and now Jonathan Attard when he was faced with questions in Parliament over the Mercieca and Caruana Curran case – have always tried to keep a distance with how the AG’s Office operates and the decisions it takes.

In many ways that is a good thing: the long arm of the law needs to be independent from any government interference or authority. But in cases such as these when this long arm of the law has knotted itself to a point that it has consistently dropped the ball, action needs to be taken.

The best way forward for the country and for its justice system is for Buttigieg to step aside or be made to step aside.