At its core, the 17 Black case is about politicians and businessmen enriching themselves off the backs of taxpayers.

That is what makes it so infuriating that it has taken so very long to get this far. It is painfully obvious that had the institutions done their jobs with arrests and interrogations when damning evidence was in the public domain, justice would not have progressed at this glacial pace, and Daphne Caruana Galizia – who we know was working on a cache of Electrogas documents when she was assassinated – might still be with us today.

It was Daphne who first published the name of the then mysterious company. She was killed a few months later.

I will never forget receiving the FIAU report that forms the backbone of the evidence in this case.

Nor will I forget being repeatedly threatened with legal action and incarceration for possessing and subsequently publishing it.

It was leaked because there are good people in our institutions who could not bear to see justice derailed and undermined at every turn to protect those in power at the expense of everyone else.

The struggle didn’t stop at presenting the report to the magistrate, asking for the inquiry, and then publishing the report so that the public could have access to it.

That report was a treasure trove of information, travel details, bank account numbers, records of meetings, and credit card transactions.

We worked together with journalists so the insatiable greed conveyed in those pages could be investigated further, leading to revelations ranging from the complex money laundering structures that were used, all the way to the fraudulent Montenegro wind farm project.

The pattern is always the same. The Maltese people are robbed so that those meant to be protecting their interests enrich themselves.

Throughout this saga, the secretive UAE jurisdiction was used to justify the lack of progress. I held meetings not only with the police in Malta but also with UAE officials to get to the bottom of it.

The UAE always claimed that Maltese authorities made very little effort to obtain the information they claimed they needed; that they made ‘mistakes’ when submitting requests, and waited years before asking for crucial follow up information, all of which Malta’s institutions deny.

This milestone is by no means the end of the story- David Casa

Where the truth lies is still unclear today. But what I am confident about is that the international pressure created to ensure information was transmitted through official channels for the purpose of underpinning prosecutions, mainly through the European Parliament, worked wonders to elucidate to both sides the consequences of not doing things properly.

These magisterial inquiries have become the only way through which the Maltese people can hope to achieve some form of justice after being betrayed, defrauded and robbed.

But we must never forget that they are a measure of last resort made use of by masters of the law like the relentless Jason Azzopardi to push for justice when the institutions like the police refuse to their job.

That’s not the way it should work. But confronted with hijacked institutions, that was the only way we could hope to stop the steal.

It’s because of Simon Busuttil, the NGO Repubblika, Jason Azzopardi and the Nationalist Party that the never-ending cases of pigging out off our backs are seeing some form of consequence. And that means the situation is very desperate, and that the collapse of the rule of law that made the assassination of a journalist possible is still very much prevalent today.

The conclusion of yet another inquiry is an important milestone, and it gives great hope that despite the institutional capture there are still people who are ready to do their duty and go above and beyond it.

But this milestone is by no means the end of the story.

Every effort must now be made to ensure that what has been achieved is not sabotaged and derailed, and that we work relentlessly to restore the integrity of our institutions so that they protect the Maltese people, not the corrupt politicians robbing them.

David Casa is a Nationalist Party MEP.