If you’re facing charges for drug trafficking, your assets are frozen pending trial. If you’re acquitted, you get your bank accounts back. But, by then, your business would have gone belly up. It’s true you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. But that’s just the way it works.

Until now, that was also the case if you were charged with laundering money. While you waited for your case to be decided and for your guilt to be proven, or otherwise, your assets were frozen. That meant that, no matter how much money was in your name, you had to live on €13,000 a year. If you had special needs, like paying your children’s school fees, you needed permission from the court.

The government is effectively abolishing (though they would say softening the impact of) temporary asset freezes for cases of money laundering. They’re keeping temporary asset freezes for drug trafficking.

That means that if they catch a drug trafficker trafficking drugs, they’ll freeze their assets pending conviction. But if they catch a drug trafficker laundering the money they made from trafficking drugs, they won’t freeze their assets pending convictions anymore.

It also means that, for the government, money laundering is not a serious crime, or not a crime they need to take seriously.

That’s stupid. Remember the classic Al Capone case. The police couldn’t get him for all the murders and the extortion. They got him on tax evasion instead because organised criminals don’t commit murder for murder’s sake. They do it for the money. If you can’t catch them making the money, catch them spending it instead.

If you have money you can’t explain, if you’ve used layering to hide where it came from, even if the crimes you committed to make that money cannot be proven, money- laundering laws are meant to allow the State to reach you. A big part of securing justice is not just punishing thieves. It’s also to take from them what they’ve stolen and to give it back to the rightful owners.

I don’t think this change in the law the government is introducing is because they are too concerned with the hardship suffered by money-laundering drug traffickers. I think it’s because they are worried about money-laundering politicians or former politicians who could be facing charges for turning bribes they received and taxes they dodged into expensive shopping bags and gaudy jewellery.

Bribery and tax evasion are wrongly seen as victimless crimes. Laundering the proceeds from bribery and tax evasion are perceived as even less harmful. The public reacts angrily when the government demonstrates ambivalence towards violent crime and so they should. Blood on the floor shocks and angers. The public can be unperturbed with financial crime, often mistaken for higher-end wizardry, just a case of the smart being smart.

Corruption, especially on the scale we’ve experienced over the last 10 years, has victims. Someone’s relative has died earlier than they would have because three public hospitals missed a decade of investment while languishing in the profiteering hands of pirates who allegedly bribed ministers.

For the government, money laundering is not a serious crime- Manuel Delia

Everyone’s household budget is that much smaller because every electricity bill is skimmed to pay Azerbaijani swindlers contracted because of the bribes they allegedly paid ministers. The economy of the country we live in is beneath its potential because of every investment redirected away from us, alienated by the stench of exposure of money-laundering banks and passports for oligarchs and crooks.

There’s an intuitively dismissive reaction to that.

Everyone is a victim of corruption, which can mean nobody really is. It is just part of the framework, a universal condition we live under, like bad weather or a neighbouring war. Being a victim is a special status like being hit by the pointy end of a dagger. How can it be special to be like everyone else, a victim of the same thing?

Repubblika published a document a few days ago adopting recommendations being made by our sister anti-corruption organisations worldwide in preparation for an update for the UN Convention Against Corruption.

We argue that, as citizens, we have a right to good governance. That means the State has the duty to prevent corruption and to punish perpetrators when it happens anyway. When corruption occurs, the State should recognise its failure in the way that our laws already provide for recognition of State responsibility when, say, someone is beaten up under police custody or when someone’s property is taken away arbitrarily by some State action.

We have proposed the setting up of a State-funded but independent advocate for victims of corruption and for the creation of a fund to compensate victims. It will be up to the State then to recover the cost of that compensation from the people who abused their power or their influence to enrich themselves.

We live in a country where the man accused of complicity in the killing a journalist to prevent her from exposing the bribes he allegedly paid to ministers for a public contract, continues to profit from that public contract. And the ministers he allegedly bribed have suffered no more than a little humiliation. The public paid and continues to pay.

Never has the gap between the thinking of the government and the thinking of civil society about what to do with corruption been wider than it is now. We think about victims and how to alleviate the hardship they suffer because of the greed of the few who behave as if the country’s wealth is their private property.

The government’s concerns are elsewhere. They’re worried about the inconvenience caused to alleged money launderers by the judicial process  and how it could stop them from buying their flashy bags and shiny jewellery even if for a while. They don’t mind if we think they stole from us, as long as we don’t force them to give it back.