If this had been a republic

There was a time when if you hid in a church after robbing someone in the street, the law could not reach you. Nothing happened to you as long as you stayed in the church. Churches no longer shelter thieves. Parliaments shouldn’t either.

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Last Sunday it-Torċa published a front page report that caused confusion instead of explaining the point it meant.

A doctor died and his family was not satisfied with the official explanation about how he was treated before his death. Everybody suffers when they lose someone close to them. The suffering is greater for those who come to believe death was caused by the action of others. Even the error of others.

This family wanted an investigation into the death of their relative. The police saw no wrongdoing so the family asked for an inquiry in court. The magistrate turned them down. They appealed and the judge turned them down as well. It-Torċa reported this last decision by the criminal court. The judge explained that an individual’s right to ask for an inquiry didn’t mean that an inquiry could be launched for no reason. There needed to be a clear reason to launch an inquiry. It is not enough to have suspicion of wrongdoing. There needed to be traces of a crime.

That’s all understandable. Inquiries shouldn’t start for no reason. If they did, imagine what my neighbour could do if there was a crack in our common wall. Instead of suing me for damages he could ask a magistrate to start an inquiry about some other inexistent thing. He might tell the magistrate I’m selling drugs from my living room even though none of it is true.

What did it-Torċa say? The headline and the article’s content discussed a separate inquiry, completely unconnected with the story of the doctor who died prematurely. Readers of it-Torċa would be forgiven to think that the judge was speaking about the inquiry into corruption in the sale of three hospitals that kicked off nearly five years ago at Repubblika’s request. If they hadn’t read it-Torċa, they could have watched One TV talk about what it-Torċa said and spreading the deception that a judge said there should have been no inquiry into the hospitals’ case.

They mix things up to cause confusion.

When Repubblika went to court five years ago it was clear to everyone that Karin Grech, St Luke’s and Gozo General Hospital were sold through a swindle. You are free to criticise any privatisation because you might disagree that governments should be selling the family silver. That is a discussion for the political space. You might criticise a privatisation because you think the sale was too cheap. After all this is not unlike siblings disagreeing on a price to sell property they’ve inherited. It’s all normal up to here.

But whether you agree or disagree with the sale of three hospitals, the price was not the biggest scandal. The fact nobody knew who they were sold to was a scandal. The fact that their representative in Malta was being pursued elsewhere for fraud was a scandal. And above all the fact that years went by, millions were paid, and the hospitals didn’t get so much as a lick of paint was a scandal.

And then, two years after they were given the hospitals, when they went bust and put up St Luke’s as collateral for a pay day loan, the biggest scandal happened. There have been past privatisations that didn’t work out. When that happens the government takes back what they sold and hold on to it or sell it to someone else. But in this case the government let the people who bought the hospitals and ran them down, to resell them to someone else and quit the scene with money for nothing.

Everybody knew this. And there were other things everybody knew.

For example, everybody knew that before they published the tender for a competition for hospital buyers, they had already signed a contract to sell the hospital to the people who won the tender. Sometimes you suspect the government has fixed a tender. This time it wasn’t a matter of suspect. There was a signed document. It was signed by Chris Cardona.

Like everybody else we expected the police to act. But the police had an unwritten policy to do nothing if politicians are involved. This is a country where politicians were exposed by the Panama Papers eight years ago and none of them have been charged. This is a country where someone who is in prison accused of killing a journalist for exposing his corrupt relationship with ministers to get a power station contract, still profits from that power station.

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That is why Repubblika went to the magistrate. It went there armed with the evidence that everybody saw because the evidence had been published by Daphne Caruana Galizia and after her death by other journalists. And the evidence was in the auditor general’s findings.

Repubblika asked the magistrate to investigate Chris Cardona who signed the contract before the tender was out. And they should investigate Konrad Mizzi, the minister who set it all up. And they should investigate Edward Scicluna, the minister who blessed it all.

The suspicion that Joseph Muscat was the mastermind of all this was always there. Suspicions are not enough. To ask for someone to be investigated you need sufficiently clear traces. Mind you, you don’t need conclusive evidence. If you had conclusive evidence there would be nothing left to investigate; you could start prosecution. But you don’t start on mere suspicions.

Eventually the suspicions sharpened. Hours after leaving his job as prime minister, Joseph Muscat outed himself as a consultant to the hospital owners. He worked for them and spoke for them. Someone commented under last week’s TikTok’s post comparing what Muscat did with Lawrence Gonzi’s negotiations with Skanska on the construction of Mater Dei. Apples and oranges. You are free to disagree with Gonzi’s agreement with Skanska. But Gonzi was never hired by Skanska.

Suspicions became traces when we learnt that Joseph Muscat was pocketing money from the formerly bankrupt guys who first bought the hospitals and had sold them to Steward with Prime Minister Muscat’s blessing. I say ‘we learnt’. If it weren’t for Times of Malta reports we still wouldn’t know. It was no longer a matter of suspicion.

Suspicions have become traces of crime. Not conclusive evidence of a crime. Traces of crime. Journalists can only go so far. It is for the police to search in someone’s home to uncover what they would hide and find conclusive evidence.

This is the fifth year of this inquiry. Joseph Muscat is right to be annoyed having to wait so long. After all if he’s innocent he would want his name cleared asap. The whole country is right to be annoyed because justice delayed is no justice at all. Don’t forget that an inquiry wouldn’t be able to rule that Muscat is guilty; only that there is enough evidence to force him to respond to charges in a court of law. A decision on guilt would be years away still.

This is not just Muscat’s problem. Anyone named in an inquiry must wait for years. Every victim of crime must wait years for justice to be served on someone who stole from them or killed someone close to them. No one can fix these delays apart from the government.

The government never complained before now that inquiries take longer than the law expects them to and much longer than would be reasonable. Now they’re complaining because there’s an investigation into one of theirs that could politically harm the party. Instead of fixing the systemic causes of the delays, the government is undermining the inquiring magistrate and saying she’s taking her time to damage the party in the elections.

This is the same deception of it-Torċa and One when they use a judge as a sock puppet to undermine the inquiry that Repubblika asked for.

In a democracy, it is politicians who are backed by the majority who govern. So it should be. But this is not only a democracy. If the majority ruled we’d take a vote and a majority would abolish taxes. We’d led the minority of the poor and the sick to fend for themselves. This is a republic where the law is the same for everyone and even the most popular politician must obey the same laws that govern the smallest among us.

Our republic is undergoing the toughest test of its history. The government wants us to fail.

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MANUEL QAL, Season 1 Episode 5

Written by Manuel Delia
Video Production: Michael Kaden / NEWZ.mt