Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1398274
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 1 AUGUST 2021 OPINION Raphael Vassallo Sorry may not be 'the hardest word'… but it's a good start RIGHT, let's get the obvious out of the way. I don't think anyone in his right mind – and yes, I sometimes do tend to number myself in that category – would have been at all 'surprised' by the outcome of the public inquiry into Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder this week. Least of all, I imagine, Prime Minister Robert Abela himself. After all, it was only last Sep- tember that Labour MP Glenn Bedingfield had (somewhat aggressively) questioned the board's impartiality in Parlia- ment: arguing that "the inquiry was allowed to turn into a polit- ical exercise", and accusing the presiding judges themselves of having "ulterior motives". Just a few weeks earlier, Ab- ela himself had attempted to impose a time-limit onto pro- ceedings… all the while, ex- pressing "reservations about the way in which the inquiry is failing to keep to the terms of reference given to it". Nor did it help much, that both those arguments seem to have been lifted directly from Joseph Muscat's own song- sheet. (Muscat himself went on to testify before the same inquiry in December; and after accusing the judges of having 'failed miserably'… he likewise complained that the inquiry itself had "deteriorated into a political exercise".) Clearly, then, the Labour gov- ernment – first under Joseph Muscat; and later under Rob- ert Abela (who had, after all, promised 'continuity' from his predecessor) – was bracing it- self for what it knew all along was going to be a guilty verdict. And… well, there could be a very simple explanation for that, too. For even if we accept – just for the sake of argument – that there may indeed have been valid reasons to doubt the board's impartiality… it still doesn't change the objec- tive truth of the inquiry's main findings themselves. There can be no real denying, for instance, that there was – and some might say, still is - an "atmosphere of impunity, generated by the highest eche- lons at the heart of Castille […] which, like an octopus, spread to other entities and regulators and the Police, leading to the collapse of rule of law." Even the simple fact that no prosecutions have ever tak- en place, all these years later, with regard to the Electogas corruption scandal (to name but one 'sin of omission', out of the many identified in that report)… it's already enough to confirm yet another of the in- quiry's main conclusions: i.e., that "failure to [take action] sent a message that these peo- ple were not only able to act above the law without suffer- ing the consequences, but also that they had the protection if not the blessing of the Prime Minister." Besides: it can't exactly be a coincidence that this same 'culture of impunity' was also cited separately by the FATF, when giving its own reasons for grey-listing Malta last month. Taken together, both those verdicts point in the same, rather unmistakable direction: that, for all the government of Malta's cosmetic efforts to project the opposite impres- sion, over the past 18 or so months… it has very clearly not done enough to iron out Mal- ta's glaring rule of law issues, once and for all. The FATF can see this; the public inquiry board can see this; and so, too, can Robert Abela himself. So if his govern- ment was all along resigned to the inevitability of this latest, damning indictment… it was not because of any 'bias' on the part of the judges; but rather, because Robert Abela knew full well that his government was, in fact, 'guilty as charged'. And this, I suspect, is also the reason why Abela – like Joseph Muscat before him – had tried so hard to discredit the entire board of inquiry in the first place: so that he would be able to turn around, upon publica- tion of the report, and tell us: "See? Just like I predicted, the entire exercise was political- ly motivated from the start… so what else could you possi- bly expect?" Etc., etc. (which, let's face it, is pretty much how Robert Abela has always react- ed to all previous indictments of his government: including the FATF grey-listing.) Then again, however… well, this is the only part that I found truly 'surprising' – puzzling, even – about this latest devel- opment. Despite having in- vested so much in a strategy to pre-emptively defuse the im- pact of this explosive report… Robert Abela chose not to ac- tually play that card, when the time came. On the contrary: not only did he fully accept the inquiry's damning conclusions – thereby tacitly admitting what his own government has been denying for years: i.e., that the Maltese state was indeed complicit (al- beit indirectly) in Daphne Caru- ana Galizia's murder – but Rob- ert Abela even apologised to the Caruana Galizia family (while hinting that he would consider financial compensation). Now: to be brutally honest,