Creating a Mafia state
The President of Malta said that it's important to understand why some people believe that Malta is a Mafia state.
A Mafia state is when the "operators" of the state can no longer be differentiated from the criminal enterprise that they form part of. In other words, a government that is itself a criminal enterprise. The first and most fundamental step in creating a Mafia state is capturing the institutions, and eliminating all checks and balances.
A democracy rests on four main pillars, and the pillars provide checks and balances on one another. Or rather, they're supposed to.
The Legislative is the Parliament, where Labour rule by a huge majority. The Executive - the government - has been taken over, run by Labour cronies, often Labour MPs or high-ranking Labour Party officials with absolutely no qualifications for the jobs they were posted to. The Judiciary has been stuffed with Labour party exponents, including a former Deputy Leader of the party. As to the Press, most of it is heavily reliant on the government for its survival. Not much of it is truly free and independent.
No institution was left untouched. Immediately Labour was elected, the police commissioner, a man of great integrity was fired to be replaced by a puppet commissioner, who would guarantee impunity and protection for the corrupt.
From the very first days that Labour was elected, corruption and crime received a heavy dose of steroids. Only a few days after the Labour victory, the Prime Minister's chief of staff Keith Schembri and his top Minister Konrad Mizzi went running to open identical opaque financial structures that were to receive €5,000 a day (each) from another opaque structure belonging to Yorgen Fenech, the alleged mastermind behind Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination. When Caruana Galizia exposed these structures and their owners, the then Prime Minister Joseph Muscat protected them with all his might.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated for exposing the scam generating all the corruption. To date, the alleged mastermind behind her assassination has not been convicted. To date, the people who were involved in any way in the heinous crime, including the aiding and abetting of the mastermind, have not been indicted. To date, the stories she wrote exposing corruption and crime remain conveniently uninvestigated.
After Caruana Galizia's assassination, other investigative journalists have provided us (and continue to provide us) with tons and tons of documented evidence of corruption and money-laundering of the proceeds of corruption and crime, yet in eleven years, not a single minister, government executive, or high-level government official is behind bars for corruption.
The findings and recommendations of Public Inquiries, such as that of the role of the state in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the one delving into the death of Jean Paul Sofia are carefully ignored, so that the corrupt and criminal can continue acting with brazen impunity. The two public inquiries are also testimony to how the central government is complicit with criminals. It is not surprising that there was so much resistance by the government to them.
The whole system is skewed to ensure that the corrupt and the criminal can act with brazen impunity, without fear of punishment.
Labour's Malta falls well within this definition of "Mafia state". Unfortunately, too many are living in denial and refuse to accept this truth, or that they are able to do something about it.
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