I have spent the last seven years since my retirement and return to Malta, after over 45 years working in Europe, writing about several issues that caused me and all the people I know grave concern about the moral, political and intellectual health of our population.

Daphne Caruana Galizia had been writing about the same issues and paid for her disclosures with her life and, still, we did not learn to change our attitudes.

The start of criminal cases against top politicians, businessmen, accountants and others in the Vitals/Stewards fraud is just the beginning. Other inquiries about Electrogas, Pilatus, 17 Black and who knows how many other cases of bribery and corruption not being investigated will see the light of day in the future.

The spread of the disease of greed, corruption and criminal association, aka mafia, will involve so many politicians of the Labour Party, many professionals like lawyers, doctors, architects, accountants, civil servants, bankers, developers and simple go-betweens that it will look like a pandemic.

To me, it appears that something is endemically and intrinsically wrong with our society. We appear to be extremely sick and have caught the ‘mafioso bug’ in a very widespread manner.

It is true that members of the Labour Party elite and civil servants chosen by them to stay on in their roles after the Joseph Muscat purge in 2013 and all the persons placed at the top of all public authorities by the Labour cabinets of Muscat and Robert Abela have very advanced stages of the disease.

But it also is apparent that people of other political colours have had the same microbe in them since so many of them shifted their allegiance from the Nationalist Party to the Labour Party under Muscat. Why did they shift? Why did they switch and repeat their switch decision in two elections? Were they planning to get involved in the widespread cheating, stealing, money laundering and other crimes that we are hearing about or were they just convinced by conman Muscat’s seductive lies and rhetoric?

So many cases of cheating have hit the news in the past 10 years with more as yet undiscovered that it is obvious that a vast number of Maltese citizens have no qualms about cheating. There are those who lead others to cheat, those who follow without thinking and those who help and abet in the background acting as professional advisers.

All are guilty and all are sick.

Of course, we also have a very large number of foreigners living among us. The South Americans, Asians and Africans are not involved. They are just being used as tools by crooks to make money.

Yet, the other substantial group of foreigners, investors, retirees, corporate leaders who have moved part or all of their business to Malta because of tax evasion and tax planning reasons or because of the ease of money laundering their illicit or shady gains know and understand the seriousness of the local situation.

They knew before they came and, maybe, came here because of the shady business practices and low tax regime created by the Nationalists to siphon away taxes from other European partners in the EU or they came for valid reasons of low labour costs and an efficient labour force or a growing tourism market or a vibrant construction industry.

It appears that something is endemically and intrinsically wrong with our society- John Vassallo

By now, they have understood how sick Maltese society has become. They read, hear and, sometimes, get involved in the robbery of national assets, the potential of bribes being accepted by the authorities for permits, lax controls or even fraud against the State and, yet, they stay on.

What would normally have started as a trickle of departures and slowly become a stampede away from the disaster area that Malta will become when the present hospital fraud case and the future energy, banking and bribery cases hit the world headlines has not occurred.

Why, may I ask? It is not because there is no fault among the accused in the cases before the courts. It is not that the numerous scandals did not occur. It may be because the disease affecting the Maltese mafia is so infectious and easily transmissible that they have caught the disease too.

They pretend not to have noticed how bad the situation is when the permanent secretaries in ministries followed illegal orders from their ministers without daring to do their duty, just like the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

A country where the former finance minister and present governor of the Central Bank besmirches our country’s already spattered reputation by declining to act as a gentleman he pretends to be. He just shows how advanced the disease has become that he even goes to meetings of central bank governors on our behalf when he is charged in court.

Shame on our prime minister who fails to fire him or put him on unpaid leave until his name is cleared.

Is the pandemic incurable? Can we stop the internal bleeding and halt the pandemic? Can we punish enough of the criminals severely enough to frighten others from continuing in their mafia-like actions and find their way back? Yes, there are cures and there is hope but it takes courage and numbers.

Courage of those who have always believed that the Labour Party cannot do any wrong to see that, this time, their party has been hijacked and taken too far away from socialism. They should protest vote for the Nationalists in the election just to warn their government that the majority can be lost if no change occurs.

And, finally, all those who are sitting at home not deigning to get up from their armchairs, where they sit and grumble, must make the effort to go and vote against the present government.

Most of all, the youngsters who are voting for the first or the second time, please, help your country by giving the present government a lesson.

It is our right and out duty to save our country from disaster.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.