Sheltering thieves

In 1930s Chicago there was a famous criminal. His name was Al Capone, knows as Scarface. The police knew he made his millions as an organised crime boss. They knew he killed many people and caused many others to be killed. But every witness they had against him died or changed their story. They just couldn’t pin Al Capone down. They then accused him of dodging tax on all that money he had, and he ended up in prison.

It sometimes happens that the police do not have the evidence they need to secure the conviction of criminals. To reach the criminals they would need to reach their money.

That is why we have a law against money laundering. To use small words, if you can’t show where your money comes from – they’re not from your salary, you haven’t sold some property, you haven’t inherited from your grandma – then it must mean that you’re not supposed to have that money and it’s taken away. Even if they can’t prove what you did to get it in the first place.

The challenge is you can quickly hide money or give it to someone for safekeeping. It takes much longer to complete court proceedings. That’s why the system is that when you’re accused of laundering money, your assets are frozen, and you’re left with just enough to live on. If you’re convicted your assets are taken away for good. If you’re acquitted, you get your money back.

For many years the law was barely used. That’s while we started readings about different mafia organisations using Malta as their laundry. Get this: these are the profits from drug trafficking, slavery, extortion rackets, and arms dealing. This money comes from the blood of the victims of cruel and violent crimes. This money went through slot machines and poker tables run by firms licenced in Malta: they paid a token tax to make everything look clean and they used that blood-stained money to buy luxury homes in London and Miami.

It’s not unlike helping a thief or a murderer hide in your home until the police looking for him pass by. That’s why we angered the world, and we were grey listed until we showed that we started using our anti-money laundering laws.

And boy did we use them. Instead of using them against mafiosi and big criminals we used them against a couple running a local butcher shop cashing social security cheques from customers who ran out of money for food before the month was out. True, they were breaking the law. But instead of acting proportionately on their minor wrongdoing, we ceased all they had and crucified them as if they were Al Capone. We paraded the suffering of these few small timers to prove we were acting against money laundering, and we were let out of grey listing.

The government is now removing the law that temporarily freezes assets of people accused of money laundering while they wait for their conviction or acquittal. The government says it’snot fair that so much suffering is inflicted on people who are still presumed innocent until proven otherwise. It’s not right that everything is taken away from them.

Instead, now, when someone is charged, they can freeze only that portion of their wealth prosecutors can show was obtained from some illegal activity.

I argue they’ll be fucking it all up. If the American police could show which portion of Al Capone’s wealth that he dodged tax on came from thievery and murder and his other crimes, they would have gone straight to charging him with thievery and murder and his other crimes. That’s why they got to his money because they couldn’t get to where he got it from.

This change being made by the government means that in practice the punishment for money laundering is only applied on those convicted of the crime which earned them the money they laundered. If that’s the only reason, it’s there we don’t knew an anti-money laundering law. It’s just a case of increasing the penalties on the original crime.

Let me explain that. If a court convicts someone for stealing a million-dollar jewel, it would send them to court, say, for five years from robbery. If there’s a separate punishment because after stealing the jewel, they sold it off the black market, why go through the trouble of proving the sale occurred? Isn’t it obvious that if they stole something, they meant to profit from what they stole? Send the thief then to serve seven years for robbery and be done with it.

Why is the government making this change then? Because there’s a good chance that Joseph Muscat is charged with laundering his profits from corruption. It seems likely that Joseph Muscat was involved in a lot of stuff when he was prime minister. But in the case of the hospitals, he got caught receiving money. There appears to be a good basis to charge him.

He didn’t just get caught receiving money. He also tried to show that he received the money for some other reason: to pay him for consultancy services. In other words, he tried to launder proceeds of crime. Allegedly.

If they accuse him of corruption (because he was paid) they may well have to accuse him of laundering the money (because he tried to cover it up). As the law stands between the moment he’s charged until he receives a final decision, they would have to freeze his money and he’d have to live on around a thousand euro a month.

Mrs Muscat would not be able to pose with photos and branded bags. They’d have to live like thousands of Maltese families, on less hundreds of euro than the Muscat family spends on toilet paper.

They wouldn’t be crucifying the local butcher no one ever heard of. They would be crucifying Joseph Muscat. And though even Muscat is innocent until proven guilty, it would not look good on him and his royal family to see him struggle to make it to the end of the month.

It’s for him that we are dismantlin the law with which we’re supposed to be catching big criminals.

The government’s excuses are baseless.

It is true that temporary asset freezes inflict suffering and it is unfair on those who are ultimately acquitted. That’s the reality of life though. Is it not unfair for someone to wait five years in prison for a murder trial from which they’re acquitted?

It is also true that it’s one thing to have your assets frozen for six months or so, and altogether another to wait some 8 years or more. Whose fault is that? Is it not because of delays in the administration of justice? Isn’t it up to the government to fix this? Should we rather dismantle a law so no one will expect it to be enforced?

The inquiry the government set up after Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed found she was allowed to die because the government cultivated a culture of impunity. So that the corrupt people in Joseph Muscat’s circle avoided consequence, a rule of delinquency was fostered allowing criminals to expect they would be allowed to do as they please.

To allow Joseph Muscat to avoid consequence we are doing even worse. Before now they put to sleep laws they were supposed to capture criminals. Now, just in case some police officer, some prosecutor, or some magistrate of conscience shakes themselves out of their slumber, they are dismantling the laws they’re supposed to use to capture criminals.

And we, in this country we call home, keep sheltering thieves.

MANUEL QAL, Season 1 Episode 2

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