Giving a presidential pardon to solve a murder case is a rarely used but efficient tool of governments. The pardon should be limited to the particular crime for which the information and testimony is granted.
It is understood – and that is how the press is reporting it – that the particular pardon being considered by Joseph Muscat to be granted to the alleged middleman in the Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination, in order to find the mastermind, is not limited to that crime alone but any other crime the pardoned person may be indicted for in the future. This means the pardoner would seem not only to be pardoning the suspect but also himself and any others who might be involved in other crimes linked to the murder.
If the murderer, middleman or mastermind have any link to any of the disclosures made by Caruana Galizia, including the Panama accounts, the hospitals’ sale, the alleged bribes linked to the power station and 17 Black, Egrant, and so on, and if the pardoned person may be exonerated from these other crimes by an open-ended pardon without the need to provide sufficient evidence in those cases, then the pardoner is also freeing potential other criminals who have yet to be found and tried.
Thus, those who opened accounts in Panama, those who received or gave bribes, those who made secret Skype calls to Mossack Fonseca to open secret accounts, would more or less go scot free. If the pardoned person today has evidence or participated in these other crimes of tax evasion, money laundering, bribery, tender fixing or secret deals with Azerbaijan, this evidence cannot be forced out of him. The pardon given today to solve the murder exonerates the pardoned person from guilt in any other crime he may have committed or have knowledge about.
Thus the pardoner is pardoning not only the middleman in the Caruana Galizia murder, he is also indirectly pardoning or, at least, burying forever out of the reach of the police, of the courts and of the public, potential evidence in cases that may involve his Cabinet, his consultants, potentially himself as well as businessmen, foreign governments and investors who may be using Malta as the laundromat of the EU.
This is all conjecture because it may be that the pardoned person has no connection to any other disclosure made by Caruana Galizia in her Running Commentary.
All those who wish to know what was said by Karl Cini to Mossack Fonseca in that famous call… would dearly wish the Maltese government to accept the US offer of help
But it is unheard of that a presidential pardon be given for crimes other than that for which the information is exchanged with the prosecutors. A pardon wider than this could be considered a pardon that extends to many other potential suspects because access to information is lost.
Without the threat of indictment and imprisonment, the holder of information has no reason to disclose what he/she may know to the police and prosecutors (if they really wish to investigate and prosecute).
In fact, it appears to me that the recent breakthrough that led to the arrest of the middleman, and the offer of the pardon, only came about because, Europol, Interpol and US intelligence agencies were investigating money laundering that, surprise, surprise, happened to pass through Malta and its financial services sector.
It did not happen because our chief of police stopped stuffing his rabbit stew and did his job.
A propos the offer of the US government to help Malta in its investigation of the murder of Caruana Galizia, was it taken up? If not, why not? Was the offer linked to other potential cases? Could it have been linked to that infamous Skype call in 2013 by Karl Cini to Mossack Fonseca?
If that is the case, I would not be surprised if the government has not accepted that help. Let me explain why I think it may have to do with Egrant.
According to the Snowden disclosures on May 20, 2013, the US government had been secretly collecting, ever since 9/11 in 2001, all data including e-mails, electronic messaging, Skype calls and other data that US tech companies stored for their customers in the cloud. A report in The Guardian and other newspapers had erroneously concluded that this data collected by the US secret services in its fight against terrorism was given to them by the cloud computing companies themselves through a secret agreement called PRISM.
PRISM never existed and there was never a secret agreement between the companies that collected and stored all electronic data in the Western World and the US government agencies. The information about PRISM was false and was spread by US secret services as a smokescreen.
What actually had been happening for many years before May 20, 2013, and for many months after that, was that the US and the UK secret services agreed to surreptitiously tap the underwater cables outside the coast of the UK. These cables carried all electronic data traversing the world from data centres to all customers and back to data centres. The customers were private citizens, companies and governments.
Thus, for many years the US secret services had been illegally collecting data without any permission from a court, without permission from the cloud data services companies or from the owners of the data, whether citizens, companies or governments. It was only after this news broke that data companies sued the US government and fought against this sweeping secret collection of all e-mails, SMS and Skype calls, bringing lawsuits and engaging in discussion with US President Barack Obama, that this secret tapping came to an end.
The data companies also decided to encrypt all data passing through these underwater cables and this was done around the latter part of 2014. The US has, in store, all data prior to that date.
Should Malta accept the US offer of help? Of course!
All those who wish to know what was said by Karl Cini to Mossack Fonseca in that famous call, announced by the leaked Panama Papers e-mail but never asked for by the AG, police or magistrates in Malta, would dearly wish the Maltese government to accept the US offer of help.
This so that all e-mails that could be connected to the murder of Caruana Galizia as well as all electronic data including Skype calls and SMS communications made by Nexia BT, ministers and advisers to the Prime Minister and others involved, would be made available.
Then and only then can we start to hope that we can end the uncertainty and lack of trust in our own institutions.
There should be no pardons given if these pardons could bury the whole truth from ever coming out.
John Vassallo is a former vice president of Microsoft and former ambassador of Malta to the EU.